Map of You
by zennie
Summary: Chapter 31 up.
1. Chapter 1

**Map of You**  
  
Summary: For some reason, it's a typical plot device to have Sara injured in the line of duty. What can I say? I'm a sucker for clichés. CS.  
  
Title from the song, "Map of You" by Susan Voelz:   
_What about your lips?  
Underneath my fingertips  
In a dark room  
Touch is true  
I'm drawing a map of you   
Step lightly   
My dreams are at your feet_  
  
-------------  
  
1.  
  
"Sara, I need you to work the bathroom. I think the original crime scene is the bathroom, not the backyard, and I want you to work that." Catherine braced for the argument she knew was coming. Sara always wanted to be in the middle of every investigation and for her, that meant the place where the body was found. Catherine was already framing her counterarguments in her head, but instead of the spirited rationale she expected, she got a quiet, resigned "okay" as Sara picked up her kit and turned her back.  
  
Catherine watched as the taller CSI headed indoors, puzzled. That wasn't like Sara at all, not even considering how subdued and quiet Sara had been the last few months. She frowned in concern, not for the first time, over the changes that had come over the younger CSI, before turning back to her work of mapping and photographing the scene.  
  
Catherine straightened up from where she was crouched and had been for the last half hour, feeling a little lightheaded, to realize she had been hard at work for the last two solid hours. She hadn't seen Sara come out of the house yet, and she frowned in irritation, as she headed to the bathroom.  
  
Sara was laying on the floor, surrounded by at least a whole container of fingerprint dust layered over every surface in the bathroom. Her long legs stretched out almost the entire length of the bathroom and she would have looked like she was sleeping, except for the quiet, almost-whispered strains of a Joan Jett song. She often sang when she got caught up in something, but she tried to hide it from the rest of the crew, Catherine knew, because it seemed to embarrass her even though she had a nice singing voice. Catherine couldn't make out what she was working on; a small stack of evidence bags was piled by the kit, but Sara seemed intent on swirling even more fingerprint dust on the underside of the rim of the claw-foot tub. Catherine crouched in the doorway to get a better look as Sara blew even more fingerprint dust over a small section.  
  
"Sara?" She got a grunt in reply, but she was still singing, so Catherine didn't know if she really heard her. Sara applied a film to the spot she had been powdering and humphed again. "Sara?" Catherine called her name again, a little louder. "How are you doing?" She expected Sara to jump or react, but instead she just started talking like they had been deep in conversation for the last few minutes.  
  
"Looks like our perp cleaned and bleached the whole tub. There's blood, probably the vic's, so you were right about the crime scene being here." She lapsed into silence as she peered up at the rim again.  
  
"What did you get?"  
  
"Partial." Sara replied. She frowned up at the film in her hand, as if it had failed her somehow.  
  
"So are you done in there?"  
  
"Huh?" She was back to looking at the underside of the rim. "Oh." She came out of her daze just a little, looking around the room and pushing herself up into a sitting position, her long legs tucking under her as she rose. "Yeah, I guess so." Sara dragged a gloved hand across her face, leaving a long streak of dust along her cheek. "Yeah, I'm done."  
  
"I told you to be thorough, but... whoa." Catherine's sentence was cut short as her legs buckled a little as she tried to rise. She caught the doorframe and pulled herself up, bodily.  
  
"Catherine? You ok?" Sara was looking up at her from where she was crouched by her kit, packing up her gear. Her voice sounded concerned and she had half-risen, as if to catch her.  
  
"Yeah." Catherine shook her head to clear it. "Got up too fast or something."  
  
"When's the last time you ate?"  
  
"I dunno. Is this today or tomorrow?"  
  
"Tomorrow. Probably got low blood-sugar or something." Sara's voice was clinical as she snapped the locks to her case shut and stood. "Come on, let's go." With her long legs, she quickly out-paced Catherine and was out the door. Catherine shook her head and followed with a wry look on her face.  
  
Sara's kit was packed and the SUV was already running by the time Catherine got to the truck. She climbed into the passenger seat, still trying to get the slight dizziness to recede. "Here." Sara offered her a powerbar from whatever stash she always seemed to have when they were working. "This will hold you until you get real food."  
  
"Thanks." Catherine smiled gratefully, although Sara's manner was abrupt and cold. "You sure you don't need it?" She asked, but Sara was ignoring her completely.  
  
"Dispatch. CSI Unit 2. We are leaving the scene with an ETA of one hour, over."  
  
"An hour? It's only about 20 minutes back to the lab."  
  
Sara put the SUV into gear and pulled away from the curb, tapping her fingers restlessly against the steering wheel as she drove. "Lunch. We're over three hours into a double and we need to eat. Besides, I know a good cafe right around the corner."  
  
"I can wait til..." Catherine started to protest until Sara cut her off.  
  
"I can't." Sara seemed to be taking a page from Gil's playbook, Catherine mused. Gil often made autocratic judgments based on whatever he thought people needed without asking. But Catherine knew Sara was right -this time- and decided not to argue.  
  
Sara swung the SUV into a gravel parking lot and cut the engine. Catherine caught her arm as she was about to get out of the truck, and said, "Um, Sara? Catherine tried to smother her grin at the puzzled look and the big smear of pink power, and indicated her own cheek.  
  
Sara glanced in the mirror and looked dismayed. "Shit. Why didn't you tell me?" she asked as she smeared it further. "Dammit."  
  
"Here. Hold still." Catherine leaned over, catching Sara's chin between her fingers and wiping carefully with a tissue. Sara's eyes went wide and she started to jerk her head back at the unexpected touch, but Catherine finished before she could complete the gesture. "There." Sara was still giving her an odd look. "What? It was the least I could do since I didn't tell you about it in the first place. I was going to, but I then I almost fell over from lack of food." She flashed Sara a lopsided grin. "And it did look kind of cute." Sara's nose wrinkled in a look of disbelief and she bolted out of the SUV, and laughing, Catherine followed.  
  
Sara was already seated at a booth when Catherine found her. Catherine slid into the seat across and considered switching the coffee in the break room to decaf and not telling anyone. Sara needs to slow down, she mused, as Sara's fingers drummed on the table top, not impatiently, but to some hidden beat.  
  
"Hey Sara, long time, no see." The waitress came up, pouring a cup of coffee automatically for Sara before looking at Catherine questioningly.  
  
"Hey." Sara smiled up at the waitress, the first time Catherine had seen her smile in days. "Yeah, I haven't been eating out as much. "How's biz?"  
  
Catherine pretended to study the menu while watching Sara and the waitress, Liz, chat for a couple of minutes. Sara's smile glowed at the waitress as she teased her about someone named Mike.  
  
"So what are you having today, now that you've finally decided to grace us with your presence?" The waitress teased back, swiping at Sara with a menu.  
  
Sara realized that she wasn't alone, and looked across the table. "Cath? Are you ready? Oh, btw, Liz, this is my colleague Catherine. Catherine, Liz."  
  
"Nice to meet you." Catherine smiled at the pretty brunette, who smiled back. "And yeah, I'll take the turkey club on wheat, no bacon, and water, thanks."  
  
Sara gathered up the menus from the table, handing them to the waitress, as she told her, "The usual."  
  
"Smoothie?"  
  
"Of course! Thanks. Oh, hey, Liz, make that two smoothies. Thanks." She caught Catherine's comical outraged look and shrugged. "What? They make the best fresh fruit smoothies here. It'll boost your blood sugar faster than anything."  
  
"So you are, or were, a regular?" Catherine's voice picked up right at the end to turn the statement into a question.  
  
"Yeah. I live not too far from here and often stop by for a smoothie or something when I go for a long run, like my reward for having gotten the seven miles in. But I haven't had time to run in like a month." She smiled at something Catherine wasn't privy to, and then explained when she caught her puzzled look. "Usually I sit up at the counter and harass the wait staff."  
  
"What, you?" They shared a smile for a second before Sara brows knitted and she seemed to withdraw, as if she wasn't sure if that was a dig at her or not. She had done that too often, Catherine thought, cut her down like that. "Sara, I..."  
  
The ringing of Sara's cell stopped her. "Sidle. Yeah? What?" She snapped at whoever was on the other end. "We just stopped for lunch on our way back. I don't think I have to explain to you what happens to the human body... Yeah, we'll be there shortly." She snapped the phone closed without saying goodbye and glared down at it.  
  
"Grissom?" Catherine ventured a guess.  
  
"Yeah."  
  
Catherine glanced down to the cell phone on her belt to check that it was on. "I'm primary on this. Why'd he call you?"  
  
"I'm more fun to yell at, I suppose." She answered, her eyes and voice flat and emotionless.  
  
"He's been really hard on you lately."  
  
"Yeah." Layers and layers of meaning were packed into that single word, and Catherine had no idea how to read them.  
  
Catherine waited for Sara to say more, but she just sat there, staring off somewhere in the middle distance, lost in thought. Her cheekbones seemed more pronounced than usual, and Catherine realized she had lost some weight. Along with her sense of humor, she thought, and again wondered at the change. Sara had never been outgoing in a personal sense; she hadn't talked much to any of the other CSIs about anything much beyond work. Grissom seemed to be in her confidence the most, but Catherine doubted she opened up to him any more than the rest of them. Professionally, though, she had been outgoing and involved. Had been, that is. Until about seven months ago, right after the lab explosion, when she had become, not less intense about her work, but more, bitter. Like a light had been snuffed out, some burning passion that had always shone through the way her mouth would twist, both in confusion and pleasure, as she relentlessly tracked down traces and clues, was extinguished. She still did her work as conscientiously as always, as the bathroom this morning evidenced, but without her prior energy.  
  
Sara noticed Catherine's gaze and her eyes narrowed, causing Catherine to take a sip of her drink quickly. "You were right, by the way." Catherine smiled one of those smiles that usually works on just about any body with a pulse and was glad to see the hard lines of Sara's face relax a little. "This smoothie is great. I should let you order me around more often," she teased.  
  
There was a snort of laughter from the other side of the table. "Yeah, that will happen." 


	2. Chapter 2

"Where's Sara?" Gil asked as he sat down in the break room.  
  
"I just saw her in the hallway a few minutes ago," Nick said, looking around the table.  
  
"I'm sure she'll be here." Catherine gave him a look to say, back off, but he ignored it. "You're late," he snapped at Sara as she came in the door. Sara pointedly ignored him as she sat down, dropping a stack of folders down on table in front of her. Grissom glared at her for a moment, and then looked around at the rest of the table. "So where do we stand?"  
  
Catherine sighed. "We're waiting for analysis on the trace."  
  
"Um, actually, we got a hit off of the partial and blood from the bathroom. Two types of blood from the bathroom." Catherine shot her an annoyed look down the table and Sara's shoulders hunched defensively. "Sorry. I tried to page you."  
  
Catherine looked down at her belt. "Oh, shit, Sara, I must have taken it off. Sorry."  
  
Sara's face was emotionless, as was her voice. "Anyway, the perp just got out of prison in California a little over a week ago, a Daniel Green." She slid a folder down in front of Grissom. "Apparently, this isn't his first stop. There were a couple of DBs with a similar MO in the last week in California. A contact of mine faxed me the files." She slid another folder down the table to Grissom, still only looking about two feet in front of her. "And I just got a call about," She glances at her watch, "8 minutes ago that vic #2's cash card was used in the Strip about an hour ago to make a hefty withdraw. I stopped to map the location with hotels and casinos nearby before I came in since I imagine he's probably still near that location, gambling or something." She slid the last folder down in front of Grissom, keeping her eyes down.  
  
"I'll..." Gil seemed a little unnerved by her demeanor, unsure what to say. "I'll call Brass. Excellent work, Sara." There was a chorus of agreement from around the table. Gil paused in his dialing, "Did you want to go on the search?"  
  
Sara gave him a blank look. "Nah, I have paperwork to finish up before the end of shift." She hoisted herself out of the chair and was out the door, to the puzzled stares of her colleagues.  
  
Everyone else followed her out, but Grissom motioned for Catherine to stay. After hanging up the phone with Brass, he asked, "What's wrong with Sara? Do you know?"  
  
Catherine sighed. "No. But something has been bothering her lately, especially this last week." She gave him the patented pay-attention look that Gil usually registered and did, in fact, pay attention to what she was telling him. "And you are not helping any. Jumping on her for taking lunch? Calling her when you should have called me anyway? And embarrassing her in front of everyone just now about being late?" Grissom looked more and more uncomfortable as she read off the list of things. "And that's just today. You've been really hard on her, for months, when you aren't actively avoiding her."  
  
Gil shifted in his chair and didn't meet Catherine's eyes when she looked at him. "What? What's going on, Gil?" When he didn't answer, she put a note of warning into her voice. "Gil?"  
  
"She asked me out."  
  
"She did what? When?" She glanced around behind her, quickly, to make sure nobody was in the break room.  
  
"Last year. After the explosion."  
  
"Did you? You didn't? Right?"  
  
"No."  
  
Catherine tried to catch his eye, but he didn't look up. She read his avoidance and sighed. "You wanted to, didn't you?" He nodded. "So you overcompensated by being hard on her so you wouldn't be accused of favoritism?" He seemed to be thinking, as if unsure that's what he had been doing. She sighed again in exasperation.  
  
"Damn it, Gil." Catherine slammed her hands down on the table, breaking him out of his train of thought. "Everyone's noticed how you haven't been working with her on cases and how hyper-aware you are when she makes the slightest mistake." She leaned back in her chair and glared at him. "You've..." She blew air out noisily. It wouldn't help to list his offenses to him, again. "Well, that explains the last few months. But I think something else is going on this last week."  
  
"Do you think I should talk to her?"  
  
Catherine rolled her eyes before shaking her head, emphatically. "No. I'll try to talk to her." She snapped her chair back to upright. "What you need to do is get over this. You can't date and I'm sure Sara knows that. It was right after the explosion?" He nodded. "That shook us all up. Remember that incident with Brass? Where she rushed in instead of waiting for the PD to secure the scene?" Gil nodded again. "Maybe there was something going on there, risk-taking."  
  
"But you need to start working on rebuilding your working relationship with her." She caught his confused look. "Lighten up on her. Trust her to do her job. And start working on cases with her as much as the rest of us. Work with her, not against her, professionally, and that will go a long way." He looked at her questioningly. "She messed up by asking you out, personally, but you are taking it out on her professionally. Because the two are so close for you. For both of you." She shook her head sadly. For a genius, he was so dense sometimes. "You just get back on track professionally." He nodded thoughtfully, his mind already working on what was probably already labeled "The Problem of Sara" somewhere in his head.  
  
-----------------  
  
Catherine paused outside 'Sara's lab,' as it was called by most everyone else. None of the labs were actually assigned, but Sara always seemed to work in that particular one. Her head was hunched over her paperwork, dark hair cascading down over her face, as if to shut out the world. Poor kid, Catherine thought, remembering her defensive look from the break room earlier. She's just expecting everyone to come down on her. And she's not wrong most of the time, Catherine admitted ruefully.  
  
"Hey." She leaned against the doorframe.  
  
Sara glanced up from her paperwork for the moment it took to register her presence and then went back to pretending to be absorbed in her paperwork. "Hey."  
  
"You lied." Sara looked up at her again, her nose wrinkling and her eyebrows knitting together. Catherine held up her pager. "You tried to page me three times. I'm sorry, Sara. I shouldn't have assumed you didn't try to contact me." Catherine couldn't tell if Sara accepted her apology; she just sat there looking worn and tired. "Not that you needed my help anyway," Catherine continued brightly. "That was great work. They caught the guy only like 200 feet from that cash machine, playing slots. He was all packed up and ready to leave after spending the afternoon gambling. Your work on this case stopped a serial spree killer before he moved on."  
  
"Thanks," she replied, less monotone but with nothing remotely close to warmth.  
  
"Look, I know we're not exactly friends..."  
  
"Yeah, you are right about that," Sara interrupted, a note of scorn in her voice. "So if you are about to tell me I can talk to you, well, why don't we just wait for the spirit to move me?" Her eyes sparked with defiance, but pain lurked there was well. "We both know when that will be, right?"  
  
Catherine stopped herself from retorting, although having the snippy comments she made years ago thrown back in her face stung. "You know what I like about working with you? Or liked, anyway?" Sara's eyebrow quirked in an you're-not-gone-yet expression. "How enthused you are. Every crime scene is just like a big adult playground for you. Or was. A year ago, you would have been out the door when you got that info about the ATM with your hair on fire, dialing up Brass when you were already half way to the Strip, and nobody would have been able to stop you. Would have been like getting in the way of a hurricane. Now you 'politely' decline and get caught up on your paperwork. I don't know what's going on, but I do know I miss that enthusiasm. I miss that Sara." Catherine lets the silence stretch for a moment. "Anyway, you have my number. If the spirit moves you." She left at that, leaving Sara staring after her with a thoughtful expression remarkably similar to Gil's. 


	3. Chapter 3

Catherine hesitated outside of the oak door to Sara's apartment. She knew she probably shouldn't be pushing so hard so soon, but she had to admit she was concerned. Still, Sara had made it pretty clear she didn't want to talk to her, but the pain she head seen lurking in Sara's eyes made her wonder if Sara really meant it or if the words were just a barrier put up to see if anyone would make the effort to get through. She can always slam the door in my face if she wants, after all, Catherine chuckled to herself, as she raised her hand.  
  
Knocking hard, she waited, hearing strains of music coming from behind the door. At least she's not sleeping. The volume increased dramatically when Sara swung open the door.  
  
"Wow. That's... loud."  
  
Sara scowled. "Don't tell me you are my new neighbor and you came to complain about the noise." She leaned a shoulder against the door, arms crossed and head tilted questioningly. She seemed to be deliberately blocking the door and the scowl on her face did nothing to belie the impression. But for all her belligerence, she seemed more at ease, softer around the edges, than she had at work earlier. Ragged levis and a black tank top replaced the pants and blouse she had had on earlier, and her barefeet peaked out from under the cuffs, making her shorter and less imposing. It was a good look for her, Catherine thought.  
  
"No. But I'm surprised there's not a line down the hall." Catherine grinned to show she was joking and got a ghost of a grin in return.  
  
"The guy downstairs usually just bangs on the ceiling," Sara deadpanned.  
  
"So... can I come in?" Catherine waited for the slamming door, but Sara just leaned back slightly and indicated the interior with a movement of her shoulder. Catherine had to squeeze by her in the narrow hallway since Sara didn't move far enough back to give her room. She brushed by, noticing not for the first time the distinct height advantage Sara had, even with bare feet. Catherine glanced up just as she passed and saw a smirk on Sara's face, confirming her suspicions that Sara had crowded her deliberately. While Catherine lingered just inside the living room, Sara pushed past her to grab a stereo remote and reduce the volume on the music. She flipped a couple more buttons and something quiet and jazzy replaced the loud rock. Catherine smiled her thanks and got a shrug in return.  
  
Sara walked around behind the kitchen island off the living room and poured a couple of fingers of amber liquid into a highball. She sighed, in resignation, and, as if in spite of herself, asked, "Do you want a drink?"  
  
"What are you drinking?" Catherine rounded the island, checking out the clean but sparse kitchen. The microwave looked like it had seen heavy use. The rest of the apartment was modern and tastefully minimalist; white walls and dark furniture, and books but no pictures or mementos gracing the bookcase. It was tasteful, but devoid of personality.  
  
"Scotch."  
  
"Scotch? I didn't know you drank Scotch." She took in the label of the bottle in Sara's hand. "A 21-year-old Glennfiddich? Nice." She grinned up at the taller woman. "You have expensive tastes."  
  
Sara shrugged. "Only in a few things. This..." she indicated the bottle in her hand, "is a rare indulgence."  
  
"You don't mind me sharing?" The teasing tone in her voice could be, and has been, called flirtatious, but it seemed to be putting Sara at ease so Catherine kept it up. She knew she could charm anyone, but the charm usually came out a little sexual. An occupational hazard of her previous job, she knew.  
  
"No. I get out the really good stuff for all my uninvited guests," Sara replied sarcastically. She got a second highball and poured another glass. Handing it to Catherine, Sara went into the living room and flopped on the sofa, a modern black-leather affair that ended up being much more comfortable than Catherine would have imagined by looking at it. Catherine looked around the apartment while Sara sipped her drink and ignored her.  
  
"So Scotch, wine, and stereo equipment. Anything else you have expensive tastes in?" she asked, turning back to Sara. Sara smirked at her, as if to say, no need to impress me with your observational prowess.  
  
"A couple. Computer." She nodded her head toward a far wall. "Mountain bike." Catherine had missed that when she was looked around the room. It was muddy and scratched, like it saw hard, and frequent, use. Sara broke the silence. "So... you're here to talk? Figured you'd corner in my apartment me to have the conversation you've been suggesting all day?"  
  
"Yeah," Catherine said cautiously, as Sara's tone edged into belligerence.  
  
"So talk." She met her eyes over the top of her highball. "Since I still have nothing to say."  
  
"Sara..." Catherine shifted on the couch so that she was facing Sara, resting her glass on a knee and propping her head on her hand, elbow on the back cushion of the couch. "I know something is bothering you and while I know we're not close, I'm concerned. Frankly, I'm a little scared for you. You seem like you are under a lot of pressure and I don't know what kind of support network you have or what you do to deal with the stress. Showing up here may be too little, too late, but there's not much I can do about the past. But you let me in the door so I'm assuming that means you want me here." She met Sara's glare calmly. "It's not like you wouldn't have slammed the door in my face if you'd really wanted me to leave."  
  
Sara's mouth quirked into a grin in spite of herself, both because she had considered doing just that and because she really would have, regardless of how rude it would have been. Catherine read the look and grinned. "I actually kind of expected it." She took another tiny sip of her drink. "This is heady stuff."  
  
"Yeah. It'll take me a couple of hours to finish this," Sara said, indicating her own glass.  
  
A comfortable silence stretched as Sara slid down into a slouch and propped her feet on the coffee table, lost in thought. Finally, she broke it. "You're..." she began, shaking her head a little, "probably not going to leave until I give you something, huh?" She glanced at Catherine, who smiled like a shark and shook her head. She leaned her head back and studied the ceiling, playing with the glass in her hands. "I could lie, make something up. You'd never know the difference."  
  
Catherine sniffed. "Give me a little credit."  
  
"So yeah, something is going on. But it's not work-related. It's personal."  
  
"Personal?"  
  
Sara glared at her surprised tone. "Give ME a little credit. I do have a personal life. Not much of one, and it's not very social, but I do. A lot of what I do, I do alone. Like biking. Like running. Like going to art galleries. I'm comfortable alone." Her tone wasn't defensive, but factual. Sara wasn't trying to convince herself or Catherine that she was alone by choice, not by circumstance, Catherine realized, but was stating a truth.  
  
Sara contemplated the ceiling in silence for a few more minutes. Her voice was quiet when she spoke again, and Catherine strained to hear her over the music. "I have a friend. In San Francisco. She was shot. About a week ago. Line of duty. They're..." She paused and took a deep breath, "Not sure she's going to make it." Catherine could see she wasn't staring at the ceiling anymore, but rather was squeezing her eyes closed. Her jaw was clenched, holding in some emotion that she didn't want to show. Finally, she let out a ragged breath and twisted her head to meet Catherine's eye. "That's it."  
  
"That's it." Catherine echoed, disbelief evident in her tone. She let the silence stretch but Sara made no effort to fill it. She was contemplating the ceiling again, and seemed to be concentrating on getting Catherine out of the apartment by the power of her mind alone. "So you're worried about your friend? So why don't you take one of your million vacation days and go to San Francisco?"  
  
"I can't."  
  
"You can't?" Catherine shook her head in confusion. "You have the days. And the lab can function without you."  
  
"Thanks, good to know I'm expendable."  
  
"That's not what I meant and you know it. Now are you going to stop avoiding my question and answer me?"  
  
"I can't. If she..." Sara struggled with the words, blinking back tears, "dies, then..." she shrugged. "But if she wakes up, she won't want to see me. So going there won't help. Either of us."  
  
"Why wouldn't she want to see you? If she's a friend..."  
  
"She's an ex." Sara blurted the words out so suddenly that it took Catherine a moment to register what Sara just told her. Sara, she noticed, was studiously looking anywhere but at her. Catherine wondered if she was nervous because she told her something so personal, or because she had admitted she was bisexual. Or something like that - the label didn't seem to fit somehow, she mused.  
  
"I take it, it didn't end well?" Catherine asked, ignoring for a moment the other questions that had bubbled to the surface of her mind.  
  
"You might say that. Flying plates, screaming obscenities, a visit from the cops bad, in fact." Sara's mouth twisted into a bitter smile. "And all my fault."  
  
"You... were throwing plates?" Catherine knew Sara had a temper, and she had heard Sara had even gotten in a few suspects' faces, but she couldn't imagine Sara violent or out-of-control like that.  
  
"Me? No, no, but I deserved them being thrown at me."  
  
"Did... it happen often?" Catherine asked cautiously. Sara had always gotten very emotionally involved in their domestic assault cases and Catherine wondered if this was a sudden insight into why.  
  
Sara must have read her look, because she shook her head vigorously and managed a self-conscious smile. "Just once. I'm not that socially-inept - I figured out kinda quick that we weren't going to kiss and make up. I moved out the next day. Minus a few dishes."  
  
Catherine found she couldn't help asking the next question. "So... had you dated other women? Before or since?"  
  
"In San Francisco, yeah. A few while Lucy and I, uhh," she dropped her head into her hand and squeezed her eyes shut, "were together." Sara met Catherine's eyes, seeing Catherine's battle with her own emotions. Infidelity was never a favorite with the older woman, she knew. "We were 'supposedly' non-monogamous, in theory at least, but I was the only one who put it into practice. And I wasn't exactly discrete."  
  
Catherine leaned back, her eyes wide. "Wow. I never..." she shook her head, amazed, "would have guessed. Both the women thing and the sleeping around thing." She gave Sara a sheepish look, as she couldn't think of a better way to phrase that last point. Sara pushed a lock of hair back behind her ear and pursed her lips as she studied the floor, clearly embarrassed.  
  
"Grissom called like a week later and I left. I haven't seen her in almost four years." Sara realized she was still holding her glass, and took a big drink, feeling the alcohol burn down her throat. "And that really is it."  
  
Catherine laid a hand on Sara's shoulder. "Now was that so hard?"  
  
"Excruciatingly painful, yes," she laughed, a little of her sarcasm and wit resurfacing. Catherine watched her mouth soften into a smile and a little warmth seep into her eyes, like watching the sun peek through the clouds. Sara slid her chin down to her shoulder, trapping Catherine's hand, and they sat like that for a long time. 


	4. Chapter 4

"Dispatch? Where's the officer who's supposed to be with CSI 2?" Catherine glanced around the hulking stacks of wrecked cars and other appliances surrounding their crime scene, a stolen Mercedes. A dim overhead light wavered as Catherine waiting for an answer, watching as Sara walked around, checking the ground around the car.  
  
"The officer secured the scene and got called to a bar fight around the corner," the dispatcher reported, a little snippy. "He will return to your location shortly."  
  
Catherine sighed and got out of the SUV, walking around to get her kit out. Sara was already taking photographs and getting a soil sample near the trunk. "I think our perp carried something away from the car." She flicked her light toward an old mobile home sitting on the lot. "Headed that way." She started to follow the tracks, looking intent. "You want to work the car?" she asked, already ten feet away.  
  
"Sara? Where...?" Catherine looked around and realized Sara had already disappeared around a stack of crushed cars. Catherine sighed. Sara was getting more and more like Gil; he had a remarkably bad habit of just wandering off while at a crime scene, following wherever the evidence took him. Catherine resolved to talk to Sara at the end of shift. She couldn't do anything about Gil, but Sara was another matter.  
  
She was just pulling out the slim-jim from her kit when she heard the shot. Catherine stopped herself before she ran blindly to where she had last seen Sara, and ran over to the SUV instead. Her blood was pounding in her ears, so much she could barely hear herself speak, as she called dispatch. "Shots fired. Request backup." She sucked a breath past a sudden lump in her throat. "Send an ambulance."  
  
Procedure satisfied, she pulled her gun and followed the path through the piles where she had seen Sara disappear. As she glanced around the corner of the mobile home, she saw a man with a shotgun illuminated by Sara's maglight lying on the ground. For a moment, her heart stopped, but then she heard voices, too quiet to make out the words, but the husky tenor of Sara's voice was identifiable. Without hesitation, she stepped around the corner, turning on her light at the same time, and yelled, "Police. Drop your weapon." Blinded, the guy swung the gun toward her, but a voice froze him in his tracks. "She said drop the gun, asshole." In the silence, the sound of the safety clicking off preceded the shotgun rattling to the ground by just a second. Catherine ordered him to the ground and kicked the gun away as the sound of sirens converging on their location cut through the night.  
  
"Sara?" Catherine called, keeping her gun trained on the suspect. Why didn't they carry handcuffs, she fumed, as she covered him, trying to look over where Sara had been standing. She pitched her voice louder. "Sara?"  
  
Four officers came barreling around the corner as she began to panic. As soon as they had the suspect covered, Catherine grabbed a light and trained it on where Sara was slumped on the ground, a long streak of blood trailing down the side of the trailer. Before she could get over her shock, a paramedic pushed her back, already calling for a stretcher as she knelt by Sara's limp body. Catherine watched the scene numbly as they worked. She heard Sara groan as they put her on the stretcher and Catherine let out the breath she didn't know she had been holding. An IV was already running, and a huge blood-soaked bandage covered Sara's shoulder and upper arm.  
  
"Is she going to be alright?" Catherine asked as she followed the EMTs.  
  
The woman who had been first on the scene fell in beside Catherine. "Yeah, she'll be fine. She got clipped in the shoulder with a shotgun blast and she lost a lot of blood, but she's stabilized." Sara seemed to be struggling in the stretcher. "See? She's coming around already."  
  
"Cath?" Sara's voice was weak, but got stronger the second time she called Catherine's name. Catherine moved to follow them into the ambulance, but the medic stopped her.  
  
"We're about to push a pain med. She'll be under in just a minute."  
  
Catherine nodded, and watched as they closed up the doors and drove off. She stood there until she couldn't hear the sirens anymore, only coming out of the daze when one of the police officers came up to her. "We've secured the scene."  
  
Catherine rounded on him. "Where's the officer who was supposed to have secured this scene earlier?" she yelled, glaring at him. "I want him here. Right now." The officer stammered something, but she didn't listen. "Right now," she snapped, cutting him off. She walked back to the scene, pulling out her cell phone as she walked. She got back to the scene and picked up her light, looking around the area where Sara had been shot and then back to where the suspect had been standing, ignoring the police officers standing around scene, overkill now that the perp had been arrested.  
  
"Gil? Who do we have?"  
  
"Catherine? What's going on?"  
  
"I have..." her breath caught for a moment, "a secondary crime scene." She played her light over debris, and then bent down for a closer look. "Actually, make that three crime scenes."  
  
"More cars? Can't you and Sara work those?" Her silence must have alerted him, because his voice was anxious when he spoke again. "Catherine? What's wrong?"  
  
"Sara's on her way to the hospital. And I have a DB here."  
  
Mercifully, Gil didn't ask any more questions. "Warrick and Nick are on their way."  
  
Catherine closed the phone without another word and walked over to the officers, who seemed to gathering just beyond her reach. Brass joined the group just as Catherine reached them. "Who secured this scene earlier? Before my partner got shot?" Her voice was quiet, but lethal. A young patrolman stepped forward, meeting her gaze for a minute before dropping his eyes. She glared at him. "How did you secure the scene? How?" she demanded when he didn't answer. "And how did you miss a guy burying a body 100 feet away from where you were supposedly securing the scene? Did you even get out of the car? Or did you just survey the area with the spotlight?"  
  
He shifted restlessly and she could tell her summarized his actions, or lack thereof, correctly. "Brass. I want this written up." He nodded. "Now I have a scene to work." She stalked back to the scene, shaking with anger as she surveyed the blood stain again. She snapped her phone open again, knowing Gil was probably wanting more details after her minimal report earlier. "It's me. Sorry. Sara started following some footprints leading away from the stolen car and must have come across the perp hiding a body. She was clipped by a shotgun blast. She's going to be ok. Yeah, the officer got called away after inadequately securing the scene." Her voice had been factual and emotionless, but it broke. "She, it was short range, and the perp, I don't know how he... missed. Six inches to the right and..." A hand took the phone from her and Warrick caught her just as she started to sob. "Gris? Yeah, we're here. Yeah, she's ok. Yeah, we'll keep you posted." He hung up the phone and held her for a few minutes while she got herself under control.  
  
Her sobs lessened, and finally she broke free of the strong arms that held her. "Thanks. I'm ok." She met his questioning look. "Really. It was just all so sudden." She straightened and glanced around the scene. "Ok, the cops and paramedics made a real mess of our scene. There's the car, the DB, and the, uh, shooting. Nick, you have the body. Warrick, the car." Warrick started to protest, but she overrode him. "I saw the scene before they moved Sa... the victim. Now let's get this done." Nick and Warrick nodded and they got to work. 


	5. Chapter 5

The doctor left after assuring her that Sara would be fine and be waking up soon. Catherine sat and flipped through a magazine, looking at the pictures without registering them. Throwing that down in disgust, she stretched her neck, trying in vain to release the tension, and thought maybe she should go get some awful coffee from the machine she had seen as she came in when Sara stirred on the bed. Her eyes blinked open and closed a couple of times, before finally settling on open. "Catherine?" Her eyes seemed a little unfocused and she squinted. "You ok?"  
  
"Sara, hey, how do you feel?" Catherine stepped up to the bed, her tone soft. Sara was staring at her intently.  
  
"Like a pincushion. Or something like that." A frown creased her forehead. "I guess pins and little balls of lead aren't quite the same." She smiled weakly. "Not so good with the metaphors right now."  
  
Catherine smiled in return. "You're forgiven. But just this once," she warned, and Sara's smile widened.  
  
"I was worried about you. The guy, the perp, he was going to fire. Shotgun. Wide distribution of shot at that range. I thought he..."  
  
"You stopped him."  
  
"I did? Don't remember." Her eyes narrowed as she tried to recall the events after she was shot, but she couldn't.  
  
"You did." Catherine caught her hand and squeezed it tight before turning to the business at hand. "Sara, I need to get your statement. What do you remember?"  
  
Sara told her what the crime scene had already told them, more or less. "So..." she grimaced down at her shoulder. "What's the deal here?"  
  
"You are going to be fine. Some occupational therapy for a few weeks, but it should heal up good as new." Catherine glared at her, half in jest. "You scared me at that crime scene. If you ever wander off like that again, I'll shoot you myself." Sara laughed a little at that, and the sound made Catherine realize how long she had heard Sara's laugh. "Although I probably will only shoot you in the leg to slow you down."  
  
Sara held up her right hand in surrender. "Lesson learned. Promise."  
  
Catherine looked her over and seemed satisfied with her answer. "Good. They are going to keep you for most of the day today, but I think they are going to release you this afternoon. I'll be back to pick you up."  
  
"Cath, you don't..." Catherine glared at her with more seriousness this time and Sara held up her hand in surrender again. "Ok, ok," she said with mock fear in her voice. She yawned and closed her eyes, blinked them open for another moment, before drifting off to sleep again.  
  
--------------------  
  
When Catherine returned to the hospital, a nurse with a look of weary resignation was pushing Sara into the reception area. "Do you see the bandages and the sling?" Sara demanded, gesturing with her right hand at her injury. "I was shot in the ARM, not the legs. I told you I don't need a wheelchair."  
  
Catherine joined them, feeling sympathy for the poor nurse who was stuck with Sara as a patient. "Quite the handful, isn't she?" she quipped.  
  
"You have no idea," the nurse deadpanned before walking off.  
  
Catherine tried to hide her grin as Sara glared at the nurse's back. "Working the charm, Sidle?" Sara's eyes flicked up to Catherine, not in the least amused.  
  
"I hate hospitals." She saw Catherine still fighting a grin, and said wearily, "Just get me out of here. Please?"  
  
Catherine reached down and tousled her hair playfully. "It's what I'm here for," she said. The gesture caught Sara off-guard and Sara glanced up at her with a look Catherine was beginning to recognize; startled, wary, and confused, as if they were in a play and Catherine was improvising the dialogue and Sara didn't know how to play along.  
  
-------------------------  
  
Sara slumped down beside Lindsey on the sofa with a sigh on contentment, feeling relaxed, full, and dead tired. Catherine's suggestion of pizza for dinner had been the perfect comfort food after the sludge they had served at the hospital. She tried to concentrate on some cartoon Lindsey was watching, but her eyes kept closing of their own accord. Catherine woke her some time later, gently nudging her uninjured shoulder and whispering her name.  
  
"Mmmph. Sorry," she slurred sleepily. "I fell asleep on you."  
  
Catherine's smile was soft as she gazed down at Sara. "You are just out of the hospital. And I bet those pain meds make you sleepy." She was stroking Sara's hair back from her forehead and twirling her fingers in the little curls that Sara tried but couldn't control. Sara closed her eyes again, enjoying the feeling of Catherine touching her until her eyes snapped open and she sat up suddenly, too quick for her shoulder as she felt something pull. She groaned and sat back, biting her lip.  
  
"Sara? Sara? Are you ok?" Catherine's panic cut through the pain. Catherine was leaning over her, pressing a hand against her collarbone to hold her back against the cushions, afraid she was going to jump up again.  
  
"Yeah, yeah, sorry," she mumbled. "I was starting to nod off again and then I just..." She shook her head, feeling the grogginess coming back.  
  
The pressure of Catherine's hand lifted. "Come on. We need to get you to bed."  
  
As Sara struggled up from the couch, Catherine slipped an arm around her waist to steady her, and Sara held herself as straight as possible to avoid contact with the smaller woman. She started toward her bedroom, only to stop abruptly when she realized Catherine was walking with her. "Umm, what are you doing?"  
  
Catherine's voice was amused. "I'm coming to help you."  
  
"Help me?"  
  
"Sara, do you really think you can change without help?" Sara knew a denial would be unconvincing, but she really didn't think she could handle Catherine's help either. The drugs seemed to be making her loopy since every time Catherine touched her, her body was reacting in a very unexpected way. She sighed, audibly. "It's not like I haven't seen you change before," Catherine argued.  
  
"Yeah, but you haven't helped me change before."  
  
"Yes, helping is usually a violation of the un-written locker room rules," Catherine laughed. "However, this is a special occasion." She ushered Sara into her own bedroom. "I bet you are a t-shirt and shorts gal, aren't you?"  
  
Sara blushed. "Umm, ahh..." she stammered as she walked over to her closet. "I actually do have a pair of pajamas," she said as she pulled out the white linen drawstring pants and matching shirt. "Christmas present from my mom," she explained as she threw them on the bed.  
  
"Good. Because you'll probably want something that buttons so you don't have to lift your arm to get a shirt over your head." Catherine noted the very new-looking pajamas. "Have you ever worn these before?"  
  
Sara shook her head. "Nah, too encumbering." Sara caught Catherine's eyes widening as she said the last, and blushed again.  
  
"So was I right? T-shirt and shorts?" Catherine tried to catch Sara's eye, but Sara's hair obscured her face, deliberately so, Catherine was sure. Catherine's smile widened. "Less?" she guessed, sensing Sara's discomfort.  
  
"Um, were you going to help me change or not?"  
  
"Well, if you are going to sleep naked, you may not need my help after all."  
  
Sara's mouth quirked into a rueful smile as she studied the carpet intensely. "I usually just sleep in boxers, ok? Happy now that I'm completely embarrassed?"  
  
Catherine stepped close, breaking Sara's line of sight to the carpet and forcing her to meet her gaze. "You're really cute when you are embarrassed." Sara shifted uncomfortably, her eyes fixed on a spot on the wall. "But you need to lighten up." Catherine chuckled, and gave Sara a poke in the ribs until she laughed, self-consciously. Walking around behind Sara, Catherine loosened the sling, being careful not to jar her shoulder. Sara struggled with the buttons on her shirt, cursing a little as she felt slow and clumsy one-handed.  
  
Catherine shoed her hands away and finished the job, deftly undoing the buttons of the light fabric. She was reaching up to slide the shirt off Sara's right arm when she stopped, seeing Sara's eyes squeezed shut and her teeth gnawing on her lower lip. "Sara, are you ok? Does this hurt?"  
  
"No, yeah, I'm ok. This is just... embarrassing is all. I can't even dress myself." Catherine knew that someone as self-sufficient and independent as Sara had a hard time asking for help, but this seemed a bit much. She shook her head, but didn't say anything as she slid the shirt off, first one shoulder and then much more carefully from the other shoulder. Raising the pajama shirt, she worked in reverse order, carefully starting with the injured arm. As she wrapped the fabric around, Catherine noted how thin yet muscular Sara was, and she couldn't resist running her fingers lightly over the soft skin of her back. Glancing at the taller woman's face, she guessed that the movements hurt as a thin sheen of sweat covered her forehead.  
  
Sara, for her part, welcomed the pain as a much-needed distraction from the feather-like touches of Catherine's fingers on her skin. She found herself hoping that the response of her body to these touches was only some kind of weird side effect of the medication. She was concentrating so much on repeating the mantra, it's just the drugs, that she didn't notice Catherine calling her name. Finally, Catherine's voice startled her out of her reverie.  
  
"Sara? Do you want me to put the sling on while you sleep?" Sara's eyes opened and she was relieved to see her top on and buttoned, until she realized that Catherine still had to help her with her pants.  
  
"Um, yeah," she said, startling herself with a huge yawn that brought tears to her eyes. Catherine secured the sling loosely, before reaching down to undo Sara's pants, seeing an embarrassed flush cover the younger woman's face again at the need for help. Sara kicked the pants off, hurriedly, and then, blushing, said, "Um, Cath, I think I can take it from here." Her eyes were pleading with Catherine not to argue. "I'll, um, yell if I need you, ok?"  
  
Catherine relented now that the hard part was over. "Ok, but don't overdo it. I'll be outside the door." Sara sighed with relief as she was left alone to struggle with her underwear and pajama bottoms, thanking the manufacturers for putting elastic in the waist as well as the draw-string, since she didn't want to struggle with tying her pants.  
  
"Cath?" She called when she was fully dressed. Catherine wasn't lying about being outside the door; she in the room in a second. "See? All dressed," Sara told her, her words and tone putting a decidedly child-like cast on the words, and she grinned as Catherine caught the joke.  
  
"Off to bed with you, then." Catherine pulled back the covers, smirking at Sara's surprised glance. "I'll tuck you in," she kidded. "Do you want me to read you a story?" She eyed the stack of books on the nightstand. "Light bed-time reading like, _Corpse: Nature, Forensics, and the Struggle to Pinpoint Time of Death--An Exploration of the Haunting Science of Forensic Ecology_?" Sara shook her head at that, her eyes already drooping. "Ok, then, sleep tight." Catherine leaned over and gave her a playful kiss on the forehead before snapping off the light. 


	6. Chapter 6

Sara's cell phone rang as Catherine was picking up the kitchen, enjoying the simple task as Lindsey carried dishes for her. She only had an hour or so before she had to drop Lindsey off and head to work, so she decided to join Lindsey on the couch for some bonding instead of spending half an hour of their precious time in the car just to get back into the car again. Lindsey updated her on the schoolyard gossip, who was crushed on who and who was mean. Their quiet time was so special to Catherine, when she just got to listen and cuddle with her daughter, that she did this as often as they could.

Lindsey stopped mid-sentence. "Mommy, is that your phone?"

"Oh, no, Sara's," Catherine said, already reaching for it. She made a split-second decision to answer it so she could decide whether she should wake Sara or just take a message.

"Hello."

"You're not Sara," said the female voice on the other end.

"No, I'm Catherine. Sara's, uh, sleeping." She paused, waiting for the woman on the other line to say something. "Can I help you?" she prompted.

"You're in her house? Answering her phone? Who are you?" The question was direct, tactless, and almost rude. This, Catherine guessed, _must_ be a friend of Sara's. Or her personality twin. Catherine responded in kind. "I'm Catherine. Who are you?"

A soft chuckle reached her ears. "Sorry, that didn't come out right. I'm Sta, uh, Stacey, a friend of Sara's. It's just..." she hesitated, "Sara doesn't really let people into her space. So I was surprised."

"Well, I didn't actually take no for an answer."

Genuine mirth sounded over the phone. "Oh, I like you. That's actually the way you have to do it. So are you the Catherine from work?" Catherine frowned, unsure if she should be offended by the incredulous note in the woman's voice or not.

"Yes, that's me."

"Huh."

"What?"

"I just didn't know you two were close."

"We're not, really."

"But you're in her house?" Catherine wasn't sure what to say to that, so she didn't even try. "Could I speak to Sara, actually? It's important."

Catherine sighed. "I'll see if I can wake her." She knocked on the door first, opening it and turning on the light. "Sara? Sara? You have a call." Sara mumbled but didn't open her eyes, and taking in the dark circles under her eyes, Catherine didn't have the heart to try again.

"Um, Sta, she's out of it and I really don't want to wake her," she said as she backed out of the bedroom. "Can I take a message?"

"It's important," the other woman repeated.

"Yes, I know. It's just..." Catherine sighed. Sara is so gonna kill me, she thought. "Sara just got out of the hospital. She was injured at work last night and I think the painkillers have her out for the count. I'm really sorry."

"Oh, yeah, right, of course." There was another period of silence on the other end. "Could you tell her something for me?" Catherine wasn't sure her muttered 'of course' was even heard as Sta rushed on. "A friend of Sara's is in the hospital."

"Yes, I know."

"You do?" Again, that note of disbelief and Catherine wasn't sure if it was a reflection on her or Sara at this point. "Ok, well, she woke today and she asked for Sara. Could you tell her to call me?"

------------

Sara fumbled for the bottle of pills she found at her bedside, beside the bottle of water, both courtesy of Catherine, she was sure. Her back and shoulder throbbed painfully, and she cursed at the stab of pain as she shifted up in bed. Managing to get two pills out one-handed, she dry-swallowed them before she even tried to get the water bottle open. Every movement caused sharp pains to cascade through her shoulder, so that by the time she set the water bottle down, she was sweating with exertion. She hated being hurt and helpless, and her injured shoulder was going to be aggravating until it healed. Her mind traveled along those lines until she recalled Catherine helping her last night, her fingertips sliding along the bare skin of her back, and she groaned as she remembered the way her pulse had picked up and the flush that had crept up her cheeks. I just told Catherine about my experience with woman, so Catherine must think I'm a pervert after that display, she thought bitterly. Damn.

She picked up her book, determined to focus her thoughts on another topic, but her eyes drooped after five minutes and she slid back into a thick, dreamless sleep. Groggy from the drugs, she woke several hours later and staggered out of her bedroom toward the bath, stopping dead in her tracks when she saw Catherine in her kitchen, cooking and humming along with the radio. Closing her eyes and rubbing them, hard, she told herself that the drugs were once again messing with her and she was either still asleep or hallucinating a perky-looking Catherine flitting around her kitchen. When she opened her eyes, she let out a strangled groan as the apparition was still there. Making what smelled to be a delicious vegetable soup.

Catherine turned when she heard Sara's groan, and grinned at the sleepy woman in front of her, rubbing her eyes tiredly and squinting in the light from the kitchen. Once again she found herself thinking about how cute her younger colleague was, until she realized where her thoughts were leading her and she clamped down, hard, on any ruminations about the desirability of one Sara Sidle. Covering, she moved to help Sara to a chair, speaking non-stop. "I was just about to wake you. Are you feeling ok? Are you in any pain? Do you need your pills?"

Sara stopped dead, pulling her good arm from Catherine's hand, causing a ripple of pain across her back. Her soft tone tempered her abrupt actions as she shook her head slightly. "Cath, what are you doing here? You didn't stay, did you?" She blinked in the bright light in the kitchen and looked around.

Catherine's expression eased. "No, I didn't stay. I came by to check on you and make you something to eat." She waved a hand at the counter, stacked with a variety of packages liberally labeled with words like organic and vegetarian. "I picked you up some groceries too, easy to make stuff so you can fend for yourself." Feeling pleased in spite of what seemed to be a huge invasion of her privacy, Sara wandered over to the stove to peak into the pot. "This smells great. Vegetable soup?"

"Yeah. And it's ready. Sit down."

Sara waved a hand toward the interior of the apartment. "Um, I'll be right back." Catherine ladled out two bowls and set them down on the table with a platter of multi-grain bread before pouring glasses of juice and water. Joining her at the table, Sara marveled at the display, the steaming bowls of soup, bread, and even a vase of flowers, and looked at Catherine, embarrassed. "You really didn't...'

Catherine waved a hand, cutting her off. "Nonsense. Now sit down and eat. If you've been sleeping since I left, you haven't eaten in almost thirteen hours."

"Really? Wow. I haven't slept that much in... Wow, I can't even remember." Blowing on a spoonful of soup, she leaned in the bowl, careful not to jar her arm. Her sudden, huge smile caught Catherine by surprise, and Catherine had to clamp down, again, on a surge of unbidden thoughts about her young co-worker. "This is great."

"Thanks."

"You, uh, need to let me pay for the groceries. And the pizza last night,' Sara suggested as she tried the bread.

"That's ok," Catherine began, but she saw the stubborn glint in Sara's eye and she knew she had already lost the argument. "No, it's not. I'm paying." Catherine put her hands up in surrender, and they ate the remainder of their meal in silence.

"Do you want coffee?" Catherine asked as she collected the plates and headed to the kitchen.

"Cath, you don't need to, I mean, you should go... you need sleep." Sara was feeling uncomfortable again, and Catherine waiting on her hand and foot wasn't helping any.

"Oh, I'm off tonight, so I figured I'd hang with you some today before I go pick up Lindsey from school." Catherine froze suddenly, and glanced at Sara with apprehension. "Unless you don't want me here."

"Oh, no, no, it's not that. I just don't want you to feel obligated to take care of me or anything." Although if I spend any more time with you with these drugs in my system, I'll probably make an even bigger fool of myself, Sara added silently. She settled herself on the couch gingerly, listening to the domestic sounds of Catherine washing the dishes and making coffee. She wondered if the incident triggered Catherine's maternal instinct and if Catherine would go back to being critical and distant as soon as she was ok. Her pensive sigh reached Catherine as she carried two coffee mugs into the living room.

"What?"

"Oh, nothing, I was just thinking."

"About what?"

"Oh, uh, just..." Damn, she was too direct for her own good. She never learned to equivocate in situations that required it. Too late to begin now. "I was just trying to figure out what's behind this sudden friendliness," she said with a sigh, bracing for the inevitable outburst.

I did ask, Catherine thought, as she clamped down on initial response, which would have involved yelling at the very least and a slamming door as she left at the worst. Controlling her emotions, one way or the other, seemed to be a necessity around the younger woman today, but Catherine worked hard to put herself in Sara's position. She hadn't always been friendly, or even kind, to her, and Sara was right to be suspicious of her motives, Catherine realized. It must seem an abrupt change.

"Sara, I know we haven't been friends," Catherine said, choosing her words carefully, "but I'd really like to change that." She had another moment of uncertainty as she had been the one pushing the friendship and Sara had given no real indication that she wanted any such thing. "If you'd like that,' she added hurriedly.

Sara stopped herself from saying, 'I've always wanted that' in the nick of time, closing her mouth on the harsh words. "I'd like that."

"Good. Then I better tell you something now, in case you want to take that back." When Sara cast her a puzzled look, Catherine knew her expression looked guilty, probably because she was, in fact, guilty. "You got a call last night and I answered the phone. In case it was an emergency or your family or something," she explained hurriedly. "It was Sta, a friend of yours from San Francisco. Apparently, um, Lucy is awake and is asking for you. Sta wants you to call her." As Catherine relayed the message, Sara grew alarmingly pale and she seemed to flinch, as if the words struck her physically. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have."

"It's... it's ok," Sara got out, although it felt like the wind had been knocked out of her and she was having trouble breathing.

"Are you ok?"

"Yeah. Hey, um, you wanna watch a movie or something?" she offered. Catherine let her change the topic of conversation and they settled on a movie out of the stack by Sara's TV. Sara fell asleep half-way through, sliding down the back of the couch until her head was propped up on Catherine's shoulder at what looked like an uncomfortable angle. Catherine carefully shifted Sara so that she slid down further, until her head was resting on a pillow in Catherine's lap, curled up on her good side. Catherine played with her hair absentmindedly, stroking her unruly curls and watching them spring back up again, never fully tamed. Switching to re-runs of _Law and Order_, Catherine mused about the puzzle that she was slowly starting to piece together that was Sara Sidle. One set of contradictions after another suggested themselves to explain and define her: tough yet gentle, angry yet quiet, unassuming yet stunning.

It was to this thoughtful expression that Sara awoke some time later as she felt someone toying with her hair, and turned just as Catherine smiled down at her. "Good morning, sleepyhead," she teased. "How do you feel?" Sara shifted, trying to get out of the compromising position she found herself in, and grunted in pain as she jarred her shoulder. Catherine helped her up, stifling her sigh of disappointment as Sara slid to the other end of the couch. "Time for your medication?"

Sara glanced at the clock on the VCR. "Yeah. Uh, what time do you have to pick up Lindsey?"

"Soon," Catherine called from the bedroom as she found the pain medication. "I was just about to wake you." She shook out two pills and handed them to Sara, holding the bottle of water for her until she needed it. "These things really knock you out, huh?"

"Yeah, I guess so. I think I'm going to go in on the bed and read."

"Yeah, and I have to go. Need anything before I leave?"

"No, but thanks. For everything. Cath... you've been great."

"I'll call you tomorrow to check in and call me if you need anything, ok?" At Sara's nod, Catherine left, leaving Sara alone with her thoughts.


	7. Chapter 7

Cath was right about the pills knocking her out, Sara thought as she stumbled through the living room. She had woken to an incessant buzzing, and then knocking, from her front door, and she had struggled up out of bed to rip whoever was out there to shreds. One-handed at that. She yanked open the door to face her co-workers, three of them, standing in her door with huge grins and even larger packages. "What the..." she got out before Greg pressed a bouquet of flowers into her free hand. "Here! Get-well flowers," he announced, taking her arm and leading her back into her apartment as Nick and Warrick followed them in. "We also have a get-well card, get-well pizza, and, um, get-well soda.

"And movies," Nick called from where he was already turning on her TV and VCR. Sara sank into a chair at the kitchen island, and tried to take stock of the chaos that had erupted in her apartment in the last thirty seconds. Warrick was laying out three huge pizzas on the counter, Greg was fixing glasses of ice, and Nick had crept up on her, sliding an arm around her waist to give her hug. "We are so glad you are ok," he said quietly, sincerely. His drawl deepened, as it always did when he was feeling emotional. "I don't ever want to show up at a crime scene like that again, you hear me Sara Sidle?" He pressed a brotherly kiss against her cheek before heading around the bar to start serving pizza.

Although a few seconds before, Sara had been ready to throw them out, on their ears regardless of the pain it would cause her shoulder, a feeling of warmth bubbled through her as the care and concern of her co-workers was evident in their actions. She understood the reasons why they had suddenly descended on her apartment like a swarm of locusts, and she found she didn't want to toss them out just because she was too controlling about her personal space.

Warrick stepped up to give her a hug, enveloping her so her cheek rested against his broad chest. He was surprised she let him, and even more surprised when her good arm tentatively slid around his waist and she rested there. "Hey girl, how are you feeling?" Warrick asked quietly, feeling tender and protective of the slight figure in his arms.

"I'm good, for someone with a bunch of holes in her arm," she muttered, still soaking in the warmth of his body.

His mouth quirked into a smile. "We wanted to check in on you, but we'll leave if this is too much, ok?"

"Ok."

"Now if you'll stop manhandling my girl," Greg interjected, stepping between the two of them bodily, "she needs to eat before the food is cold. Your veggie supreme, my lady," he said with a bow. "Now what would you like to drink?"

They caught her up on the gossip and events of the lab, but running underneath their words was the constant reminder of how concerned they were for her and how much she was missed. At one point, Nick admitted that they had planned on a hospital visit but she had been let out too quickly, to which Greg chimed in, "Yeah, and we were going to stop by yesterday but Catherine wouldn't let us."

Often, while working at the lab, Sara had felt, or been made to feel, like an outsider in the close-knit group that had already been an effective team before she had arrived, so the attention and concern being lavished on her an unexpected, but very welcome, surprise. All the time she had been there, she had looked to Grissom to make the place feel like home, but now she realized that her other relationships were becoming much more meaningful and sustaining then the odd, and often empty, relationship she had with Grissom.

Nick and Warrick flanked her on either side as they watched movies, starting with a 'certified chick flick' that she was genetically programmed to like, according to Nick whose sisters had raved about _Bend It Like Beckham_ to him. They made popcorn, teased Greg about his favorite movie, and generally enjoyed the morning. So much so that when Catherine let herself in hours later, she was greeted by the sight of Greg, leaned back in a recliner, head thrown to the side, snoring lightly, as the blank TV screen lit his face. Nick, she noticed, was curled in a throw on the couch, the remote inches from his cupped hand.

The faint hallway light illuminated Warrick's sleeping body propped up on Sara's bed, one arm thrown protectively around the slumbering form beside him. Laughing a little to herself as she realized that she hadn't needed to cut short her nap to keep Sara company, Catherine carefully made her way around the bed to slide in on Sara's other side, her fatigue overtaking her as soon as she closed her eyes.

Warrick woke slowly, his hand automatically turning off the alarm in his wristwatch before he had his eyes open. It took him a moment to make out the slight form of Catherine curled up on the other side of Sara, or to see that Sara's eyes were open and she was grinning up at him. When he raised his eyebrows questioningly, Sara smirked and whispered, "You know, Mr. Brown, this is how rumors get started."

He chuckled quietly, and replied, "As if anyone would believe that I was in bed with both Sara Sidle and Catherine Willows." He twisted his face into a comical thoughtful expression. "Of course, if they did, I would officially be the lab stud."

"Catherine?" He indicated her other side with a nod of his head and saw her eyes dart over to the body beside her before widening in understanding. "Oh." Her sudden tension puzzled him, since she had been fine waking up next to him, but he figured that she was just surprised since Catherine hadn't been there when they fell asleep.

"I'm going to wake Nick and Greg and send them home to get ready for work, ok? Coffee?" At her nod, he carefully extricated himself from the bed before her voice stopped him in the doorway. "Hey, Rick? If anyone needs to shower here or something, that's ok." He nodded and was gone.

A chuckle from behind her indicated Catherine was awake. "What?"

"For a person who's very protective of her personal space, you seem to be making great strides."

"Yeah, I guess." Sara struggled into a sitting position before sliding to the edge of the king-sized bed. "The guys were great today," she reflected before heading out to the living room to say goodbye to Nick and Greg. Warrick finished the coffee and headed down to his SUV to fetch the bag he kept in there, deciding to take Sara up on her offer of a shower while Catherine heated leftover soup for the three of them.

"So... did you call Sta?" Catherine asked, keeping her voice deliberately casual and conversational, although the sudden tension in Sara's shoulders, accompanied by a wince of pain, told her the attempt was in vain.

"No. I'm thinking of calling her tonight."

"That would probably be a good idea," Catherine agreed. She set a bowl in front of Sara where she sat at the kitchen island, her shoulders slumped and her teeth working her lower lip relentlessly. "You know I'm here for you to talk to, anytime, right?" Her reassurance didn't have the desired effect; if anything Sara's nervous gnawing increased as she searched Catherine's face. A quiet 'yeah, thanks,' before turning to her soup did nothing to ease Catherine's worry.

No matter how long she had worked morgues, the antiseptic smell of hospitals always bothered her; she was sure she would never get used to the thin veneer of scent that masked the real smell of the dead, dying, and sick. The sterility was a deceit, she knew, and it made her very uncomfortable to breath the air that she imagined recycled all the germs and ills from the other patients; it was an irrational fear, and the scientist knew that the air was carefully filtered, but the child in her made her want to flee to the exits. And never had Sara been more glad to burst into the fresh air and sunshine than today. Managing to restrain herself from resting her hand on her knees and taking huge gulps of air, she dropped her overnight bag at the foot of a bench and stretched out in the cooler Northern California sun, closing her eyes behind her sunglasses for an impromptu nap.

When a shadow broke into her sun, she pried an eye open, and then shielded her eyes to get a better look. The silhouette seemed somewhat familiar, "Sta? That you?"

"Were you napping?" Her incredulous voice woke Sara up fully, and she struggled to her feet, pushing up with her good arm.

"Hey, this is my sleep time. I do work nights, remember?" Sara grinned as Sta grabbed her bag and headed toward a car parked a few feet away. "And besides, I'm just out of the hospital. Cut a girl some slack." She followed to the practical red Honda, even more relieved to be leaving the vicinity of the hospital for two days of hanging around her old home with an old friend.

Sta deposited her bag in the trunk and caught Sara in a surprise hug, her eyes taking in the sling, the sunken cheeks, and thin body of her friend. "Yeah, you look like shit, Sidle." She held the door open and helped Sara slide into the car. "You should have Catherine take better care of you," she teased gently, opening up a topic she had been dying to ask about since she had heard an unfamiliar voice answer her friend's phone a week ago.

Sara sniffed. "You think you know anything about Catherine?"

Sta settled into her seat, watching Sara out of the corner of her eye. Sara's face was always so expressive; she was a terrible card player because every emotion and thought was signaled by the twist of her mouth or the liquid depths of her eyes if you knew how to read. "You let her into your house. She took care of you while you were injured. You told her about Lucy. You like her." Surprisingly, Sara's face gave away little of what she was thinking, especially about the goad at the end, and Sta couldn't hide her frown of concern.

"She's a co-worker."

"That never stopped you before."

"She's straight."

"Also never stopped you before."

"She has a kid."

"Interesting new complication."

Finally, her expression broke from the cold, immovable mask only to show vexation. "And I don't like her, not the way you are insinuating. Now is there a reason we're sitting here in the car, not moving?"

With a sigh, Sta started the car and drove through the busy streets of San Francisco toward her apartment. A tactical change was required, she thought. "So how did it go?" There was no need to define 'it'; Sara had gotten a cab straight from the airport to the hospital to see Lucy, wanting to get that part of the trip out of way as quickly as possible so she could enjoy the rest of her weekend.

"Pretty much like I expected."

"That bad?"

"Yeah."

"I thought she wanted closure."

"Apparently that means having me fly all the way here so she can tell me how badly I treated her. Again." Sara's sigh carried over the sound of the air-conditioning. "It amazes me that, she wakes up and the first thing she wants to do is rehash the past. I just don't understand it."

"I never did. I always thought you could do so much better. Like Catherine."

"We are NOT discussing Catherine." She always could close down a conversation with that look and that tone, her soft tones doing nothing to disguise the force of her words. "If you are going to keep bringing her up, I'll change my ticket and head home tonight. Clear?"

There really was only one answer to that. "Clear. So..." she breathed, looking over at her friend again and thinking about how many meals she could get in her in the two days that had together, "what old haunts did you want to visit while you are here?"

AN: I had a whole different arc for this San Francisco subplot planned when I first began this story, but I didn't like it as I got into the story, so I just figured I'd wrap it up quick and get to a better plot. Hence this somewhat fragmented and disjointed chapter. Next one will be better: A _Lady Heather's Box, Take 2_ plot development.


	8. Chapter 8

AN: Ok, so I think I enjoy writing angst. Kinda mean, huh?

--------

Vegas seemed so much hotter after only two and a half days in San Francisco, the sun too direct, and Sara found that she missed the clouds moving hurriedly through the sky, from the ocean inland. The funny things that we learn to miss, she thought, as she surveyed the harsh glare of the sun on the desert. And while she was healing quickly, just carrying a bag of groceries up the two flights of stairs seemed to exhaust her and she breathed in the cool air of her apartment with a sigh of relief as she set the bag down and poured a glass of water. Holding the glass to her head to cool down her parched skin, she surveyed the newly straightened room and tried to remember if she had forgotten anything. Catherine had said she would stop by that afternoon with Lindsey to go for ice cream, and Sara planned on asking if they wanted to stay for dinner. Tonight was her first day back at work, and she felt like celebrating a little.

Admittedly, she wasn't looking forward to it as much as she expected, but that was because she had already fought and lost the argument about fieldwork—none for the next two weeks—so she knew she would be bored and roaming the halls like a vengeful spirit after an hour of arriving at the lab.

Lindsey burst into the apartment then, to drag her down to the car where Catherine was waiting. Sara hadn't seen her in the three days since she had gotten back from her trip, and she was surprised at how apprehensive she was to see her blonde co-worker again. But the obvious warmth of the beaming smile Catherine sent her as she settled into the seat helped to settle her nerves.

"Hey."

"Hey. You look good. How's the arm?"

"Healing. I have full range of motion now, but the stiffness and strength will take a while." Her sigh of frustration was quiet, but heartfelt. Her physical therapy would continue for another four weeks, and the doctors were already arguing with her about overdoing it.

"I hope you don't mind, but Lindsey wants to get ice cream at the Ben and Jerry's at the Rio and maybe stop in at the arcade."

"Mmmm, Ben and Jerry's." Sara twisted to grin at Lindsey in the back seat. "What's your favorite?" The two of them debated the merits of old-fashioned single-flavor ice creams—Sara preferred a classic chocolate—against what Sara teasingly called 'new fangled flavors' like Lindsey's favorite Half Baked. Their spirited discussion segued into a discussion of classic versus new video games and carried on for most of the drive. Lindsey spent a long time explaining the appeal of Dance Dance Revolution to Sara, until Catherine cut off the increasingly bizarre conversation with, "We're here."

After ice cream, they watched from a distance as Lindsey joined the group of pre-teens surrounding the popular game and chatted about the events of the last few days. Sara told the highlights of her trip to San Francisco, but avoided questions about the scene between her and Lucy other than to say that it had gone badly. The ringing of Sara's cell phone startled them both, and Sara wandered out into the concourse to hear better as Catherine watched her curiously. The blood seemed to have drained from her face, and her eyes gave Catherine a sideways glance as she spoke. Catherine had the sudden suspicion that she was somehow involved in the conversation, a suspicion that was proved right when she got closer and heard, "No, I should tell her." There was a pause, and then Sara concluded, "I'll be there soon."

"Tell me what?" Sara jumped and spun around, her eyes huge, then narrowed as she asked, "How long have you been there?" The tone wasn't accusing, exactly, but Sara didn't look too happy.

"I just walked up and heard you say you should tell her. I assume I'm the her."

Sara sighed, scanning up and down the concourse, frowning. "Yeah," she said absentmindedly.

"So tell me what?"

Gesturing toward a bench, Sara sat down, clearly uncomfortable as Catherine checked in on Lindsey before sitting beside her. "Cath, this really isn't the time or place..." she began as Catherine's scowl deepened, "but I know you won't let it go so...." Then she seemed to lose her motivation and sat staring at a black smear marring the polished floor.

"Sara," Catherine prompted, with just a hint of iron in her voice.

"They may have found the gun that killed Eddie." Sara's voice is so quiet in the din of the people passing that Catherine almost missed the words. And then it took a long time for the words to penetrate, and then the emotions swept in. Her anger, her pain, the harsh words she had exchanged with the woman sitting across from her, looking so concerned, and the guilt every time Lindsey looked sadly at a little girl with her father. Catherine forced herself to breathe, and then asked the questions foremost on her mind.

"When? Where?" Then, after a pause, "Who?"

"I don't know. The gun isn't processed yet, so we don't know if it indicates either of the suspects. I'm going in... to do that." Sara couldn't meet Catherine's eyes, unable to face the swirl of emotions she knew would be there. "I'm going to catch a cab to the lab, ok? I want..." her voice failed her for a second, her throat tightening on the words as the memory of her failure played out in her mind's eye again. "I want to get this solved, ok?"

At Catherine's nod, she tried to grin and said, "Tell Lindsey 'bye' for me, will you?" Catherine nodded again as Sara's long legs carried her quickly through the concourse.

--------

Five hours later, Sara stepped out of the fingerprint lab, her shoulders slumped in defeat and exhaustion. The energy that had carried her through the hours as she had printed the gun and ran the ballistics tests, as she had paced the floor as Bobby confirmed the match, as she had paced the break room waiting for a call from Jacqui, left her in a sudden whoosh the moment she had seen Jacqui's report, and now she stood, trembling just outside the door, her feet unable to move. She didn't look up from the readout clutched in her hand, not even when she heard the click of Catherine's heels heading down the hallway, straight toward her.

"So, what's up?" Catherine asked brightly, too brightly for her seemingly casual words. Catherine was lousy at pretense for a self-designated politic people-person, Sara thought bitterly. Not that she minded this time, since it got everything out in the open quickly.

Bracing herself against the onslaught, she said, "No match."

The veneer of friendliness fell from Catherine's face and tone immediately. "No match. Ballistics or fingerprint?"

"Match for ballistics—it's definitely the gun that was used in Eddie's murder—but no fingerprint match."

Catherine was shaking her head, rejecting the words. "How can that be? Both the suspects are in jail. We have their fingerprints on file."

"No match, Cath." Sara took a deep breath, steadying herself. "There may be a third suspect."

"A third suspect? Who you _missed_ the first time?" Her voice went up a couple of octaves on the last few words, louder and more shrill, attracting the attention of a couple of lab techs, who stuck their heads out for a moment before ducking back in. "I... don't _believe_ this," Catherine hissed. She tried to calm herself, thinking through the evidence for a moment. "Wait, where was the gun found?"

"Dayshift caught a B&E in the studio outside of which Eddie was shot. It was found in a vent."

There was a dead silence in the hallway for a moment, as if all the machines in the lab had suddenly paused and the fluorescents stopped their incessant hum. This had to be the calm before the storm, Sara thought. And then it was broken. "You. Missed. It? It was right there this whole time? What, you didn't think to look there?"

In a monotone, Sara related the facts: "There was no evidence either of the suspects went inside, so there was no reason to search inside the premise. A thorough search was conducted outside. There was no evidence to suggest a third person was there."

"So you just didn't look?" With a loud thunk, Catherine's hand connected with the glass beside Sara. Sara flinched at the impact beside her, but said nothing. "I can't believe this. I can't believe YOU." With that parting shot, Catherine stalked back down the hallway, the sound of her heels receding from Sara's ears.

Jacqui brought her out of it, finally, standing in the door to her lab to ask, "You ok?"

Sara sniffed at that, thinking how far away from ok she really was. But 'fine' was all she said, until she noticed Jacqui was still standing in the doorway, watching her with concern. "Thanks," she managed, to which Jacqui nodded, slowly, in disbelief. As she turned, Sara called, "Jacqui?" When the fingerprint tech turned back to her, she managed a faint smile. "I'm, uh, stuck in the lab. You got anything I can help you with?"

Jacqui tried a smile to bring the slumped figure around. "Of course. Unlike those lazy CSIs who only work a case a night, I've got about a zillion cases going." She ushered the tall CSI into her lab, setting her at a computer to get her started.

--------

It didn't take long for the story of Catherine's dressing-down of Sara to circulate, so that half an hour later, at the assignments meeting, Gil had already heard the story. From at least three separate people. Catherine was sitting at the table, her angry expression keeping both Nick and Warrick away from her, and the quiet of the room was an unwelcome change to the usual camaraderie that was typical at the start of shift. Gil didn't ask where Sara was, vowing to hunt her down himself, but instead met Catherine's angry eyes with his own. Hadn't she just been lecturing him about he treated Sara? Catherine, surprisingly, dropped her gaze first, and he wondered if she was actually feeling guilty for her treatment of Sara. That would be a first, he thought, as he gave her a trick roll and B&E and assigned Nick and Warrick a murder, seeing her eyes narrow at the assignment choices. For once, she didn't protest, but left the break room quietly.

Gil found Sara a few minutes later, in Jacqui's lab, setting up a fume hood to print what looked like a glove. Jacqui was giving Sara some pointers, tricks of the fingerprint trade that even he didn't know, and Sara seemed ok, so he decided not to take up the issue of Catherine with her just yet.

Later, he went looking for her again, finding Jacqui alone in her lab; when he asked her, she explained that Sara had helped her get completely caught up on the overflow from Days and so had left to see who else needed help. Greg had a similar story, his normally effervescent behavior somber and worried as he spoke about Sara, his expression distrustful and protective as he questioned Gil about why he wanted to talk to Sara.

When he finally tracked her down, she was in ballistics with Bobby, leaning over a microscope and taking copious notes while Bobby told her a story about matching a sniper rifle through an exhaustive dealer search. Even Gil could tell Bobby was trying to cheer her up, joking about the dealers he had had to talk to and imitating their various accents. He left again without speaking to Sara, leaving her to the tender ministrations of Bobby's various charms.

At the end of shift, Gil was camped out in the locker room, waiting for her to appear. She stuck her head in and glanced around apprehensively, and only his voice calling to her kept her from leaving as she saw him sitting there. She studiously avoided looking at him as she worked her locker combination.

He sighed. "Sara, I'm going to close the Eddie Willow's case. I never should have let you..."

She cut him off. "No. Please?"

"Sara."

"Just give me 48 hours. Please Griss? I... I have to do this." Her voice was quietly pleading, a tone he had never really heard from her before. She demanded, she dictated, but she didn't plead.

"Ok,' he relented. "On one condition: you go home now and I don't see you here until the start of next shift. You are still healing and you need to rest."

"I really didn't do anything."

He chuckled at that, drawing her puzzled gaze to his face finally. "I've spoken to most of the lab techs this shift. Jacqui wants you to be her assistant. Greg is leaving on time tonight for the first time in three weeks and he actually sounded hopeful that he might get his night off this week... Even Hodges said something nice. So don't tell me you didn't do anything. Although if you keep this up, I may have a riot on my hands when I return you to the field."

He was relieved to see Sara actually smiled a real smile at that. "Go home, rest, and pick up the Willow's case tonight."

She nodded. "Ok. Oh, hey, Griss? I might need to leave the lab a little, go to lockup and re-interview the two witnesses, go back to the scene..."

He nodded in understanding. "Ok, so long as you keep keeping my lab techs happy. But nothing strenuous," he cautioned seriously. "If I hear you picked up anything heavier than a piece of paper, I'll have you lab-bound for another week. Ok?"

"Ok."


	9. Chapter 9

Greg glanced through the glass to see Sara staring intently at all the evidence spread out on the table, her face her customary scowl when the evidence wasn't coming fast enough. He sighed. He hated to give her bad news, and the paper in his hands was just that.

"Hey Sara," he began, smiling faintly as she glanced up at him hopefully. He handed her the paper and watched as her face fell. "I'm sorry, there wasn't any DNA on the grip. Maybe no sweat, or it had too long to dry."

Sara's mouth twisted into a frown for a moment, before she gave him a half-hearted smile to show she wasn't angry. "That's ok. It was a long shot." She looked around the table again, her lower lip absentmindedly caught between her teeth as Greg could see her try to make something out of the evidence.

He leaned in beside her, looking over the evidence for himself. Now that he was getting out into the field more, he was trying to learn as much as he could from his co-workers. "So what have you got?"

"The gun was the only new thing, prints unknown. I went and re-interviewed the two witnesses, and they are still pointing the finger at each other." She sighed, exasperated. "I have two liars and no murderer."

Greg looked over the photos on the table, including the mug shots of the two supposed witnesses. "Or maybe you have one liar and one person telling the truth," he speculated, tapping the images with his index finger thoughtfully. Sara's head shot up and she swung to face Greg, her eyes alight.

"That's it, Greg." Her smile wasn't her brightest, but it was better than he had seen in weeks. "I could kiss you!" she exclaimed, before sweeping a pile of papers off the table and turning to the door.

"You always say that," he replied, his words catching her at the door. She spun on her heel and gave him a puzzled look, her slightly distant expression signaling that her thoughts were plotting out her next steps. "You always say you could kiss me and you never do," he challenged, trying to tease her into her normal self, if even for a moment. He thought he had succeeded when she crossed her arms across her chest, her mouth tightening into the smirk that was her getting the upper hand on someone or something.

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah." He straightened, defiant, as he faced her, his smile teasing. He expected some sharp retort, so when she leaned in and gave him a quick peck on the cheek, he was unprepared. The small smirk on her face blossomed into a huge smile at the blush that flamed from his ears all the way down, past the collar of his shirt, and at his sudden bashful manner, all defiance and challenge completely gone.

Sara shook her head, grinning broadly, as she turned to go, coming face to face with Catherine, standing out in the hall, her glare cutting through the few moments of levity like a lazar. Sara's smile evaporated as if it had never existed, but she met Catherine's glare with one of her own, almost willing the blonde to say anything. Instead, Catherine flipped her hair and continued on her way, vanishing around a corner.

Greg watched as Sara's shoulders slumped, as if something in her body cracked and crumbled after her moment of defiance, and her head fell forward so her hair obscured her face. He had never seen anyone go from happy to angry to defeated in such a short time before, and he hoped he never saw anything like that again, especially with Sara. Wishing he could take away all her pain away, he rested hand on her shoulder and uttered, "You'll solve this, I know you will."

Sara straightened a little at his words, and her head bobbed in agreement. "Thanks, Greg." And then she was gone.

xxx xxx xxx

Catherine stood in the deserted break room, pouring herself a cup of coffee from a pot she could tell had been on the burner hours too long. Her first taste confirmed it, but she barely tasted the bitter, burnt coffee. What was wrong with her, she berated herself. She had just been trying to figure out a way to apologize to Sara for the confrontation yesterday when she came across that _scene_ in the lab between Sara and Greg. Sara, kissing Greg right there in the lab, how unprofessional, she fumed, pacing back and forth.

Turning in another of her laps, she came face to face with Greg, who was in the doorway of the break room. She knew she could reduce him to a puddle with her worst glare, but he surprised her by looking her up and down, coldly, before pointedly ignoring her to cross to the coffee machine and put on a fresh pot. With one last ineffectual glare at his turned back, Catherine stomped out of the break room, leaving her half-finished cup of coffee on the counter.

xxx xxx xxx

"So according to the police report on the robbery, access to this building is restricted at all time?" The sound tech and manager nodded in unison; they had obviously gotten bored with the cookie-cutter questions the cops and CSIs were asking them. "The same was true when Eddie Willows was shot?" They nodded again, and Sara stifled her sigh of frustration at the nonverbal answers. Time to get them talking. "So walk me through the entrance procedures."

The manager looked like he was stifling a sigh of his own, and Sara could almost see the thoughts running through his head about police inefficiency. "We don't waste the money to hire a receptionist, but we have to control access since we have hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment in here. So when people need in, they buzz and we screen them before they come in."

"Do your system generate a log of entrances and times?" He shook his head. "Do you remember anyone buzzing to get in the night Eddie Willows was shot?"

"No." He caught her narrowed eyes. "We were on our last recording that night; everyone who was in was already in; nobody came in."

"Could the door have been propped open?"

"No. If it's open for more than 30 seconds, an alarm sounds here and at the security company."

"So who has access without buzzing in?"

The manager looked at her suspiciously. "What are you getting at?"

She held her hands up in a placating gesture. "I'm just trying to see how the gun might have ended up in here."

He still looked suspicious, but relented. "Me. Four sound techs. Two other managers. And the owners."

Sara nodded thoughtfully. Short list if-and it was a big if- the gun had been left the night Eddie was shot. "Was anyone else on that list here that night?"

"Just us."

"One last question: do any of the people who have access know or have any dealing with Candeece?"

He thought for a minute, and then shook his head. "No, not really. A couple of people were looking to sign her away from Eddie, but nothing real serious." He shrugged. "At least not that I know of."

"Who?"

The manager frowned, and looked around the room, as if the walls could talk. Finally, he sighed, and said, "Blake, Blake Wilson. He's one of the founders of the studio. Used to be a musician, now he works with the talent."

xxx xxx xxx

Sara groaned as she tried to straighten her back, the ache spreading from her shoulder down and across her spine. She blinked blurrily at the clock, and tried to focus on the time. Another hour and then everyone else from Graveyard would be back at work. Time for a shower, she thought wearily, as she staggered up from the chair, so it won't be too obvious that I was here all day. She reviewed the case while she took a long, hot shower, trying to ease her sore, tight muscles, and headed for a fresh cup of coffee. In the interview with Blake, her inner sense that something wasn't quite right had been all but been ringing an alarm bell above her head. He had denied having anything to do with the singer, or even meeting her. Her exhaustive database search hadn't yielded any connections, however. If she was going to link them, she needed a warrant for his records first. But to get a warrant to get his records, she had to get something on him first.

Greg broke off her train of thought as she passed his lab. When he beckoned her inside, he quickly looked left and right before pulling out two large travel mugs from some hidden spot under a countertop. The smell of coffee filled the small space, and Sara deduced it was from his private stash of primo coffee. Slipping into a chair opposite Greg, she flashed him a broad smile and began to update him on the case. He was, she decided, a good sounding board, as he wasn't afraid to ask the obvious questions, and being forced to explain the case to him made her examine every piece of evidence thoroughly in her mind as she related it. And his shy, but beaming, smile at being taken seriously eased her into a good mood. She explained how she thought that the singer had an accomplice, since she was the one who had a better chance of knowing someone with access to the studio. And she was the one who had called her dealer, possibly setting him up as the fall guy for Eddie's death. Now she just needed to get the accomplice.

"So what do you need?" he asked as her talk petered out.

"Fingerprints. I just have to figure out how," she mused, drumming her fingers absently against the cup. She realized what she was doing, and her grin took Greg by surprise. "Thanks, Greg," she said, hopping off the stool and heading out the door before he could say another word.

xxx xxx xxx

Blake Wilson was indignant to be pulled into the police station, and it showed as he thundered at Brass, and then Sara, as he was shown into the interrogation room. "I'm sorry, Mr. Wilson," Sara began, "I just needed to go over a couple things from your statement earlier." Her tone was surprisingly light and sweet. "Now you said you never had any contact with Candeece?"

Catherine slipped into the observation room as Sara asked her question, watching the man's face with interest. She had no idea why Sara had had him brought in, since she didn't feel up to asking for a case update, but she had heard via the grapevine that Sara was questioning someone.

"Right, no contact."

"And you were not negotiating to get her contract from Eddie Willows?"

"I told you this afternoon, no."

"Ok, then, thank you for coming down."

"What? That's it?" His voice rose, and even Brass looked at Sara questioningly. What the hell, Catherine thought as the guy stood, looking around in confusion. It was so unlike the usually antagonistic interview manner Sara took with suspects.

"Yup, that's all I have. Thank you for your cooperation."

Wilson grabbed his coat off of the seat and stormed out, brushing by Brass when he didn't get out of his way quickly enough. Sara's smile was tight as she met Brass' eyes. "Hey Brass, could you task an officer or a plainclothes to keep an eye on him? He might be a flight risk." Jim motioned to the officer in the room, who hurried out after the suspect, leaving him to prod her for details. "So what was that, Sidle?"

Sara had grabbed her kit and was already popping the locks as he spoke. "Huh? What was what? I just had a few questions is all." The innocent tone of her voice was belied by the triumphant grin pulling at the corners of her mouth. Snapping on her gloves, she pulled out fingerprint dust and a brush, moving over to where Wilson was sitting.

Brass chuckled as her intention became clear. "Ahhh, I think I understand your earlier interest in cleanliness."

"I sterilized the table and chairs so I could get clean prints. Could you hand me a tape please?" She pressed the tape to the area of the table she had dusted, pulling it up to look at it approvingly. "A 10-card couldn't be clearer."

"Sneaky, Sara."

She pulled another set of prints off the table. "Yeah, well, ex-musician. When I interviewed him in his office, I noticed he drums his fingers on his desk. I thought maybe he'd do the same here." She rapidly packed up her kit. "I'm gonna run these prints right now. Keep that guy on Wilson – I'm hoping for good news."

"Will-do. And uh, Sara?" She paused at the doorway and looked back. "Nice work."

Catherine leaned her head against the glass as Sara and Brass left, awash in a sea of emotions, guilt first and foremost. While Sara seemed upbeat when talking to Jim, Catherine could see the dark circles under her eyes and her too-pale skin, and Catherine knew what these signs meant; Sara was working round-the clock when she was barely out of recovery. And it didn't take an investigator to figure out why she was pushing so hard. But then there was that surge of anger when she saw Sara with Greg, teasing, laughing, sharing coffee... kissing. Catherine pushed herself off the glass and straightened her clothes and hair, resolutely deciding she would talk to Sara.

xxx xxx xxx

Catherine finally caught up with Sara in the locker room at the end of shift; Sara had gotten adept at hiding in various labs with the lab techs in the last few days and Catherine had found herself one step behind the entire shift, chasing Sara while trying to ignore the pointedly hostile looks some of the techs had given her the entire shift, including Jacqui. She stepped inside the door, letting it swing shut behind her, hoping for some measure of privacy. "Hey."

"Hey." If anything, Sara looked even more antagonistic than she had the night before, her dark eyes boring holes through Catherine's insides and resolve, so much so that she almost turned and ran from the locker room rather than face the very angry woman glaring at her. "I heard you closed Eddie's case, got the third guy," she began, conversationally. In medieval times, this would be called bear-baiting, she reflected.

"Yeah."

"Sara... that was good work."

Sara sniffed at that. "You didn't seem to think so yesterday."

"I... I'm sorry. I had no right to talk to you like that," she admitted, hoping the unusual event of her admitting she was wrong would ease the tension.

The door to Sara's locker slammed shut, rattling the locks on the entire row of lockers. "Yeah, whatever," she replied as she pushed past Catherine on her way to the door.

Catherine grabbed her arm, spinning them both around so they were face-to-face, releasing her hold immediately as Sara winced in pain. "Whatever? So that's it? You can be so dismissive when I'm trying to apologize?" Sara's eyes narrowed, whether in pain or anger, Catherine couldn't tell, and she lowered her voice, almost pleading. "I thought we were getting to be good friends. I..."

"Yeah, well, I didn't see you so concerned about our _friendship_ last night, when you were telling me what an incompetent CSI I am," Sara shot back.

"I want to apologize..."

Sara flung her hands out, cutting Catherine off. "That's just words." Her hands clenched into fists as she struggled with her temper, and Catherine suddenly noticed how close she was to an enraged Sara Sidle. Not a good place to be. "I'm not a fucking yo-yo, Catherine, although everyone in this place seems to think I am. You pull me close and then push me away, push and pull, back and forth." She backed away, shaking her head. "No more. I'm NOT doing this again." And then she was gone, and Catherine sank down onto the bench, trying to control the shaking in her stomach and hands.


	10. Chapter 10

AN: Sorry for the long time to update and for the short chapter. I've been writing more in the later chapters as some ideas came to me the last couple of weeks. Hopefully, this will make the time between updates on chapters 11-15 shorter. As always, thanks for reviews – I always appreciate the feedback. Cheers and enjoy the season premiere this week.

xxx xxx xxx

Catherine straightened from her bent position to set yet another evidence bag beside her kit. They had collected a ton of trace from the college dorm room already and that didn't include going through the sheets and clothing collected from the scene. She glanced over at Grissom, who was looking around the room with a grimace. A rape and murder on a college campus was never good, but this one had been particularly brutal, and while they had collected massive amounts of trace evidence from the room, nothing stood out as probative, or even especially helpful. It was going to be a long rest of the shift, chasing clues that would mostly turn out to be dead ends, Catherine could tell.

"Catherine, why don't you take all of this back to the lab and start collecting the rest of the trace?" To her half-hearted sigh as she eyed the mound of linens, he replied, "Have Sara help."

She suppressed another sigh at the thought, but said, "Sara? How about Greg?" In response to Grissom's pointed look, she tried to backtrack, "I mean, you know how these kinds of cases get to Sara."

"She's a professional, she can handle it." Gil watched Catherine absorb his words for a moment, and then added, "And just because your relationship is strained is not a good reason to keep her off the case." He indicated the mound of evidence with his hand. "We don't have the time to train Greg on every case, and we could use her skills on this."

Catherine did sigh then, but then nodded to acknowledge his point. "Ok, I'll see you back at the lab."

She found Sara, not surprisingly, in the DNA lab with Greg, prepping swabs and samples. She was hunched over a table, handing Greg tubes at a furious pace as he filled the machine, and when he was slow, she would glance over her shoulder and smirk at him until he laughed. Catherine cleared her throat as she stood in the door to announce her presence and found herself facing a frigidly cold glare from Greg as Sara's smile vanished in a heartbeat.

"Hey," she began, nervously edging into the room, extending a handful of evidence bags toward Greg almost like a peace offering. "I think we'll have more, but Grissom wants you to get started on these." Greg took them from her wordlessly and turned his back to her as he started to lay out the bags. "Um, Sara..." Catherine faltered when the murky depths of Sara's dark eyes gazed up at her; the expression was nowhere near as cold or angry as Catherine expected, but hurt lurking in her eyes was far worse. Fighting a sudden urge to enfold the younger woman in her arms, Catherine took refuge in her work. "I need you to help me go through a ton of linens to collect trace." In another wordless response, Sara nodded to her, waved to Greg, and headed out the door toward the layout room, so quickly Catherine had to hurry to catch up with her.

They worked in silence for the next few hours, tirelessly collecting evidence, but with none of the usual talk and speculation that helped pass the time and advance the case. Sara, Catherine noted, was professional as they worked, but she might as well have been alone as much as she interacted with, or even looked at, Catherine. Knowing she deserved the cold shoulder didn't make it any easier for her.

Straightening at long last, Catherine noticed shift had already ended and she was going to be late picking up Lindsey if she didn't leave soon. There were another stack of evidence bags she needed to drop off to trace, the evidence to secure, and her jacket in her locker... damn. "I'll finish up here." After the long silence, Sara's quiet voice startled Catherine. "You go pick up Lindsey."

Catherine shook her head. "You should go, I can...."

The first direct look from Sara in hours was her trademarked angry stubborn face, not a good sign. "I just have a little more to finish up with this," she said, hoisting the pillowcase in her hands, "and then I'll clear out, ok?"

"Sara, you are recovering, you need to go."

Sara's expression grew more stormy. "Go pick up Lindsey," she said, the clipped tone closing off any thought Catherine had of arguing further, so she just said 'thanks' and headed out to get her jacket.

xxx xxx xxx

Catherine went to the layout room where she and Sara had been working first thing that night, finding it cleared and sterile with no brunette hunched over the table. The locker room and break room did not yield her either, and Catherine was about to go make the rounds of the labs in what was becoming a habitual search when Gil caught her elbow. "Come on," he said without preliminaries, "Brass finally located the boyfriend."

"Well, good evening to you too," she quipped, and he managed to look a little abashed as he steered her toward the parking lot. "What else do we have?" she asked, shifting into work mode quickly.

"A foreign object was found deep in the vic's wound tract and the wound itself has an unusual tool pattern." He passed her a folder. "Sara took pictures."

Catherine tried to slow their headlong pace as she shuffled through the pictures. "Sara took these? When?"

"I don't know," Gil answered, holding the door open for her, frowning in irritation when she made no move to go through it.

"You don't know? Did Sara clock out at all today?"

"Oh, I'm sure she did. She's still recovering from her injury."

"Yes, because Sara always puts herself and her health before her work," Catherine replied, doing nothing to disguise the sarcasm in her voice. "Gil, I should go check on her."

"Catherine, I'm sure she's fine. We'll check on her, after we get done with this interview." Grissom's voice was forceful as he swept his hand forward, indicating the still-open door which Catherine reluctantly walked through.

The interview ended up being a bust since the boyfriend had been visiting his parents in Oregon over the weekend and Grissom had insisted on running back to the crime scene to look for any unusual objects that might have caused the jagged marks on the woman's throat, so shift was halfway over before she could search for Sara again. She wasn't in any of the usual labs, and Catherine was almost convinced she had gone home when she caught a the sound of power tools as she passed near the tool room. Sara's hunched form was perched on the edge of a high stool as she worked the tool, her black pants and green short-sleeve shirt the same as she had been wearing this morning when Catherine had left her. She tossed the tool down on the table with a snarl and reached for another, only to gasp in pain and pull her left arm back quickly, cradling in against her body and rubbing the muscles in her upper arm and shoulder for a moment before reaching for another tool—with her right hand.

"You need to go and send Sara home," Catherine announced as she walked into Grissom's office. "She's been here all day and she's overdoing it." Gil's half-cocked head indicated his puzzlement, so she explained, "Her shoulder is bothering her."

"So send her home," he replied, his tone indicating his puzzlement as to why he should interrupt his work when she was the one who was concerned.

"Me? Gil, you're the supervisor, remember?"

"Yes. So tell her I told you to send her home." Her exasperated sigh filled the room, to which Grissom only smiled his famous zen-master smile. "Catherine, just because Sara is upset with you doesn't mean that I should be the intermediary between the two of you. And you should probably drive her home if her shoulder is really bothering her," he called to her retreating back.

The tool room was quiet when Catherine came back; Sara was examining the results of a cut through a magnifying glass. "Sara?" Catherine spoke quietly, not wanting to startle her. When Sara swung the stool around to face her, her eyes rimmed with exhaustion were the first thing Catherine noticed.

"What, Cath?"

"Gil told me to send you home." The exhaustion on her face retreated a little as anger flared in her eyes, but she couldn't sustain the emotion for long. "Ok."

Catherine stepped up to the table where the remains of many slaughtered pig necks were littered across the surface. "What are you working on?"

"I'm trying to find the tool that was used."

"Where were you? I can finish up."

The weariness in Sara's voice intensified. "I'm done. I tried every tool I could think of and a few that were just laying around here. Nothing matches the marks on our vic." She shook her head in disgust as she surveyed the remains of the experiment. "Nothing."

"Yeah, we hit a dead end with the boyfriend too." Sara took in the rows of tools hanging on the wall and Catherine knew she was about to pick up something else and try again. Sara was nothing if not determined. "Come on, let's get you home," she said, catching Sara's right arm to try to lead her away from the table.

"Just let me clean up," Sara started, trying to pull away. Catherine tightened her grip. "No, I'll clean up. After I've driven you home." They were almost out the door, but Sara jerked her arm out of Catherine's grasp, not even bothering to hide the wince of pain that crossed her face. "I can drive myself home."

"Sara, your shoulder... I saw you try to pick up a tool with your left hand and you couldn't."

"What, you... you're spying on me?"

Catherine ignored the outlandish accusation, and focused on the argument that she hoped would sway Sara. "You have a standard and your shoulder is bothering you. If you re-injure it, it'll be even longer before you are back in the field." Catherine let her worry color her words. "And... I want to make sure you get home ok. Please?"

Catherine wasn't sure, but she thought that that last appeal was the one that worked as the tension seemed to drain from Sara's tall frame. "Ok," she relented, letting Catherine draw her away.

xxx xxx xxx

The short drive to Sara's apartment was mostly done in silence, the muted jazz on the radio competing with the traffic noise to provide a soundtrack. Catherine noticed that Sara's eyes closed within a few seconds of them getting into the Tahoe, and Catherine knew it was a sign of just how tired the younger woman was to let her guard so far down. Circling around well-worn thoughts, Catherine wished there was something she could say or do to ease the strain between them. Sara was strictly professional and even courteous at work, which Catherine appreciated, but she found she missed the personal interactions with Sara she had gotten used to in the past few weeks. She pulled up to apartment building and cut the engine, startling Sara out of a half-doze. "Thanks," she mumbled as she started to open the door.

"Do you still have some of those pain meds?" Catherine asked out of the blue, suddenly wanting to keep Sara with her. "You should take one, it'll help you sleep."

Sara half-turned, outlined clearly by the streetlight outside the window, but her face in shadow. "Yeah, I was planning on doing that. My shoulder is killing me."

"I'll... um, have Nick swing by before shift and pick you up." Resisting the urge to volunteer herself, even though she wanted to, Catherine volunteered the colleague who lived closest.

"Oh, yeah, I forgot about my car. Thanks," she repeated, once again reaching for the door handle.

"Sara?" Catherine stopped her once again, laying her hand lightly on Sara's. "I just wanted to tell you I'm not going to stop trying to fix the damage I've done." The back lighting cast Sara's expression in deep shadow, and Catherine had no idea how her words were registering. She forged ahead anyway. "Your friendship is important to me, and I'm not going to go away. My actions were inexcusable, but I just hope I can prove to you how much I regret them. But I'm not going away."

Sara nodded her head slowly before climbing out of the SUV and heading up the stairs, feeling Catherine's eyes on her the whole time.


	11. Chapter 11

The chill was just beginning to settle in with nightfall over the desert when Catherine headed back into the crime lab, her cup of coffee warming her hand as she tried to swing the door open while her hands were full. A sun-tanned hand caught the door from behind and held it open for her as Nick's tall frame appeared behind her. "Here, little lady, let me help you," he offered, his accent exaggerated and amused. He pulled open every door for her as they made their way into the inner areas of the lab.

Catherine suddenly realized what was wrong with the picture that presented itself. "Nick, where's Sara? Wasn't she supposed to come in with you?"

He managed to look abashed. "Sara, um, called me earlier, said she had some errands to run, so she took a cab here and got her car." Withering under Catherine's stare, Nick looked down at the floor, like a boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar. "There was nothing I could do. She was already in her car when she called. She did, um, sound rested when she called."

"She's too stubborn for her own good."

"Ya think?" Nick quipped, following her down the hall to the break room. He had to see this. Sara was sitting there in her customary spot, sipping coffee and reading a journal. "Hey," Catherine greeted as she strode into the room, her movements precise and calculated as she moved to the counter to grab an apple. Sara glanced up, and for a moment, Nick thought he saw apprehension in her eyes before her face snapped into an emotionless mask. "Hey, Cath."

"I see you got here ok." Catherine smirked at the younger woman's discomfort as she noticed Nick standing in the doorway, but she raised her chin defiantly, rising to the challenge in Catherine's words. This, Catherine thought, is much better than the cool façade Sara had been presenting to her lately. At least she's angry, her eyes alight and passionate, Catherine noted, her mind immediately adding an unbidden thought: it looks good on her. She hoped Sara missed the slight widening of her eyes as that thought registered, and she took a quick sip of coffee to regain her composure.

"I slept eight straight hours. And I don't need a babysitter." Sara's eyes shifted away from Catherine's then. She knew the next part was not going to go over well, but there was no way to hide it. What Sara was most upset about was that she was already warming to Catherine again, going back to an almost teasing back-and-forth. She mentally cursed herself for being too forgiving and setting herself for disappointment and worse... again.

"So what were your errands?" Catherine asked.

"Well, um, I may have, ah, figured out a lead on the murder weapon. So I decided to drive by the university to check it out."

Her single-minded drive might have been amusing if it wasn't so frustrating, Catherine thought; it made her such a good CSI, but it also made it hard on her friends who worry about her health and well-being. She sighed and slid into a chair at the table. "So what's your theory?" she asked, knowing a lecture on taking care of herself wouldn't do much good at this point.

Sara smiled as she enthusiastically launched into an explanation of her idea: the college student was an archeology major and many departments keep ancient implements and weapons in minimally-secured areas on campus. Plus, the unidentified substance from the wound track had been identified: obsidian, which supported her theory. So her trip to campus had included a walk-through of the department and she had found several display cases in the hallways of the department. "Brass is getting a warrant now," she finished. "We're heading over there first thing in the morning."

"Wait, wait, obsidian?"

"Yeah, it's a black rock which can be split to create an extremely sharp edge. It was used in central and south America in pre-Columbian times."

Catherine shook her head approvingly. "Ok, so we just wait for a warrant."

"Yup. Til then, I'll be in with Hodges, working on all that trace we collected." She tossed her paper cup into the trashcan halfway across the room, flashing Nick a cocky smile before she headed out of the break room.

Nick, who had watched the entire conversation with amusement, laughed as Sara left, shaking his head. "She's in a pretty good mood. Did you all kiss and make up?" he teased Catherine, not missing the blush of embarrassment that flashed on her cheeks at his comment. At least she's ashamed at how she treated Sara over that whole Eddie thing, he thought.

"We're getting there, I think," Catherine mused absently, as she tried to figure out where that flush of heat had come from in response to Nick's comment. She caught Nick watching her speculatively, and she realized she had been staring into space for the last minute. Smiling to distract him, she stood and said something about getting caught up on paperwork as she made her escape.

xxx xxx xxx

Sara surveyed the glass cases liberally arrayed around the hallway, all loaded with artifacts and weaponry, and sighed. In her rush earlier, she hadn't realized there were so many obsidian artifacts in the collection. Worse, all of them would test positive for blood—most of it ancient—and it was take extensive testing to date or work up DNA profiles on them. Catherine, she noticed, was cheerfully logging the weapons while the curator, a tall, thin, nervous-looking man in his late 30s, debated the merits of the warrant with Brass. "These artifacts are priceless and should not be subjected to this treatment." He noticed Catherine packing another knife. "Hey, be careful with that."

Sara tried to ignore the debate that now included Catherine, and walked slowly around the hallway, playing her maglight over the dusty cases as she looked for anything that would narrow the search. "Hey, Cath, come here," she called quietly, pulling her camera to her eye to snap a quick picture. "You see that?" she asked, playing her light over the spot that had caught her attention. "That void?" At just the right angle, her flashlight picked up the faint outlines of a missing, pointed form in the collected dust of the bare spot. "Mr., uh Bennett..."

"Dr. Bennett," he corrected.

"Dr. Bennett, when was the last time you moved anything in this case?"

"Over the summer, about 5 months ago. Why?"

"I think something's missing."

He walked up behind them, his eyes widening as he looked at the spot. "Yes, there should be something there." He gave them a confused look. "Do you think it was stolen?"

Sara had walked around the back of the case, examining the lock and the surrounding glass carefully. "It hasn't been broken into," she stated. Sitting back on her heels, she looked over the top of the case thoughtfully. "Do you think we could see where you keep your keys for these cases? We might be able to find some evidence of whoever removed the artifact."

"Um, yes, yes, of course," he said as he led them through the halls "I keep them in a drawer in my office." When he reached the door, he turned the knob and immediately opened the door. "I don't always keep my door locked when I step out," he explained apologetically. "I never really thought it was necessary."

Catherine followed him to his desk and started dusting for prints, but she noticed Sara was looking around the room intently. She obviously had another reason for getting invited to his office besides the keys, Catherine thought as she watched the younger woman stare out the window, seemingly lost in thought.

Catherine watched as a huge grin spread over her face and she turned abruptly from the window. "Hey, um, I think I'm going to go for a walk." Catherine shrugged her shoulders, but sent her a puzzled look.

"Sure, but take a uniform with you." Sara tilted her head to the side, rebellion already brewing in her dark eyes. Catherine stood firm. "The last time you wandered away from me at a crime scene, I ended up processing your blood," she reminded her firmly. "Humor me?"

Sara didn't look any less resolute, but she shrugged her shoulder as if it didn't matter to her. "Come on, Jim, I'll buy you a cup of coffee."

"You going to throw in a donut with that?" he asked as he followed her out the door. Catherine returned to her dusting, knowing that Sara had something up her sleeve, but content to let her run with it.

Brass smiled in amusement as Sara first crouched down by the thick bushes under the office window, and then started to wiggle her way under the woven branches, until he heard her swear and realized that trying to crawl in such a tight space could not be good for her shoulder. He was about to suggest she get a uniform to search, or even a chain saw since she liked power tools so much, when he heard her grunt in triumph. He watched appreciatively as she slowly worked her way back out, the loose jeans pulled taut and her shirt and jacket riding up her back, giving him a nice view. I wish all the women on the force looked that good, he thought idly.

"Bag me," Sara called as she held up an obsidian knife clenched carefully between her thumb and forefinger, completely missing Brass's smirk as he held out an evidence bag.

"Ok, so you found a knife. But where's that coffee you promised me, Sidle?" Watching as she ducked her head to hide the grin pulling at her mouth, something he hadn't seen in way too long, Brass crossed his arms across his chest. "You didn't get me out here on false pretenses, did you?" he asked in mock-horror, happy to hear the strangled laugh coming from the young CSI splayed out on the grass.

"I'm afraid I did, Jim," she confessed. "Rain check?"

"Sure. But coffee just got upgraded to dinner. Your treat," he warned as he pulled her to her feet. "I'm thinking sea bass."

xxx xxx xxx

Sara appeared in the door of the office just as Catherine was finishing up, pulling her out the door to show her the knife. "Brass is on the phone, getting the warrant extended to cover his office and to get him fingerprinted. I need to print the window where the dust is disturbed," she explained. "Until then, I'm going to go print the case and finish logging in all those other artifacts."

"Why don't you run that back to the lab now and I'll wait around to finish the printing?" Catherine suggested. "You found it, you run with it. I'll do the clean up."

Sara's smile lit up the entire musty hallway. "You sure? Thanks!" Catherine watched her hurry down the hallway, her eyes unknowingly following the same path as Brass's before turning back to the work at hand.

A few hours later, Catherine slid into the chair across from Sara in the conference room with a happy sigh. "Last fingerprint comparisons just finished. His prints are on the display case, the window, and the knife. It's all circumstantial since those are all places he would touch, but with his statements contradicting the evidence timeline and with the vic's blood on the knife found outside of his window, I think we can bury him."

Sara slumped in the chair in a happy state of exhaustion. She had been in the lab for over 24 hours straight, but the relief in finding the killer made her feel like she might even be able to sleep without aid when she could finally laid down.

Grissom poked his head into the room. "I heard you broke the case," he complimented. "Nice work."

Catherine held her hands up to deflect his attention. "I didn't do anything but follow Sara's lead."

"I heard. I guess sneaking out into the field before you were allowed came in handy," he teased as she sat up in her chair with her mouth hanging open.

"What? You authorized...." she protested, until she caught the grin slowly spreading across his face, and she sank back into the chair, rolling his eyes.

"In fact, you are so invaluable out in the field that I'm going to let you back on field duty starting tomorrow's shift. But, you can only work with Catherine and I and we're going to keep a close eye on you. And only if you leave now and go get some sleep. Ok?"

Her nod of acceptance was cut off by a huge yawn, and she muttered a 'goodnight' to them both before heading out.

xxx xxx xxx

Sara pulled her robe tighter around her body, her wet hair dripping all over the wood floor as she grabbed her cell phone at the last possible moment. "Sidle," she said, not checking the number display as she answered.

"Sara?" The voice on the other end was hesitant, shy, and it took Sara a long moment to place the voice.

"Lindsey?"

"Hey, Sara."

"Lindsey, hey. Sorry, you surprised me. I expected someone from work, calling on a case or something." A sudden thought struck Sara and she felt a cold sliver of fear work its way up her back. "Is anything wrong? Are you ok? Is your mom ok?"

Lindsey's voice brightened considerably as she answered. "Oh, we're fine. I called because I wanted to know if you can go for a bike ride with me and mom on Saturday."

"Lindsey, does your mom know you are calling me?"

"Well... we talked about going for a bike ride last week when we got ice cream. And you promised," she finished, putting the slightest whine in her voice. Her non-answer to Sara's question was all the confirmation Sara needed, but she _had_ promised. And the one thing she knew about kids was that they remembered every broken promise and bad thing, and Sara tried hard not to disappoint them.

"Ok. But only if your mom says it's ok. So you have to tell her you called," Sara warned, "and tell her it's ok with me if it's ok with her. Tell her we can make plans at work tonight."

Sara's warnings didn't seem to have any affect on her enthusiasm as Lindsey replied, "Great. See you Saturday" before hanging up.

xxx xxx xxx

"Are you sure?"

Sara spun around to find Catherine standing just inside the door to the locker room, and Sara found it somewhat gratifying that the blonde looked nervous and unsure of herself. "I was in the shower. She must have looked you up on my cell phone. I'm sorry if she put you into an awkward position, I really didn't know she was going to call."

"Cath, it's fine." Catherine shifted her weight onto her other foot, still reluctant to meet Sara's eyes. This was a side of Sara never saw—Catherine didn't do vulnerable well, or at all—and it was endearing and rather cute. "Really, it's fine. So long as it's ok with you."

"Of course it is. Lindsey adores you." Like mother, like daughter, she added mentally as she tried to figure out exactly when she became so awkward and nervous around Sara. She tried to attribute it to how awfully she had acted about Eddie's case, but she knew there was something more to it than that. Especially when she found herself noticing every little thing about Sara lately, or caught herself watching Sara at a crime scene.

Sara swung her locker shut with a loud clang, bringing Catherine's attention back to the present. "Ok, so we're set for Saturday then."

"Yeah," Catherine replied as Sara breezed past her out the door.


	12. Chapter 12

It wasn't the heat of Nevada in August, or the physical activity. It wasn't the fact that she started sweating as soon as she stepped out of the air-conditioned car or that she couldn't drink enough water to keep herself hydrated. No, Catherine was sure that her elevated heart rate and sudden cotton mouth were entirely the result of watching Sara reach up to pull her bike off her car rack, the tight, green t-shirt riding up even further and exposing an ever-widening swath of skin at her midsection. That, and the long expanse of well-muscled leg showing underneath her black tech cargo shorts. Catherine sighed. It was going to be a long afternoon, she thought, as she walked over to join Lindsey and Sara, a long long afternoon.

She had actually figured that out earlier, when she had awoken from her morning nap in the middle of a pleasant dream, laying there for a moment to try to keep hold of the images that were already fading from her mind. A few remnants flashed through her mind: walking, looking down to find fingers loosely interlaced with her own, a familiar heat in her hand that spread through her body, an unfamiliar face but a familiar presence behind it... She had bolt up in her bed, then, as she put a name to the familiarity: Sara. Heart pounding, Catherine tried to convince herself she was wrong, that it was Warrick or even, god forbid, Nick, but deep down, she knew. And as she watched Sara show her bike to Lindsey, licking her dry lips when Sara bent over, the fabric of her shorts tightening as she pointed out something on the bike, Catherine realized these lustful thoughts weren't just an after-effect of the dream, but something else entirely. And then Sara turned, her bright smile fading into a look of confusion as she caught Catherine's eyes.

xxx xxx xxx

Sara silently pedaled along the path, listening to Lindsey talk, occasionally smiling over at the young blonde who seemed to be pedaling hard to keep up with her. Smothering her curse, Sara eased off her pace, glancing back over her shoulder at Catherine, half a bike length behind them and also breathing hard. Catherine didn't react at all to her apologetic smile, and Sara again wished she could figure out the older woman. For the last week and a half, she had bent over backward to be friendly and follow up on trying to repair their friendship, and Sara had appreciated that, but then she had straightened after showing Lindsey the derailleur on her bike to Catherine's intense scowl. Even though Catherine had smoothed her face into a faint smile in an effort to cover, Sara had been off-balance since. She felt that maybe she was intruding and that Catherine didn't want her there, and now she was exhausting Lindsey in this heat because she was trying to get this uncomfortable ride over as quickly as possible.

Slowing, Sara noticed they were entering a park along the route, so she pulled off near the playground, not missing the grateful looks from both mother and daughter at the break. "I'm going to go get us some water," Catherine said as she hopped off her bike, pointing to a concession stand. She was gone before Sara could offer to go with her, but she covered her frustration as she sat down with Lindsey. Lindsey, she noticed, watched her mother walk away with a sad, concerned frown on her face.

"Hey, Linds, did you want to go swing or something?"

Lindsey's expression didn't change. "Mom's sad." Nodding seriously, Sara stayed silent. She might have a reputation for being bad with kids, but she knew when to listen, if nothing else. "She's been sad since you caught the guy who killed daddy." If possible, she looked sadder as she mentioned her father, and Sara repressed a sigh. "I thought that would help." Her light blue eyes searched Sara's face. "I don't know how to help. I thought having you come with us would help..."

"How would I help?" Sara asked, surprised into interrupting Lindsey.

"Well, she's happy when you are around lately. Except now that nothing makes her happy."

"You know what would make your mom happy?" Lindsey shook her head solemnly. "Seeing her little girl having fun," Sara prodded gently. Lindsey tried a faint smile that broke Sara's heart.

"You want to swing with me?" she asked.

"Um, with my shoulder, I maybe shouldn't yet. But...' she said hurriedly, "I think you should get your mom to join you."

"She never swings."

"She will. I promise." Sara ducked her a head a little so she could meet Lindsey's eyes. "If you try to have a good time today, I'll try to help your mom. Deal?"

"Deal!"

"Deal, what?" Catherine forced a light-hearted tone into her voice, watching as Sara and Lindsey seemed to be conspiring about something.

"Oh, I just bet Lindsey that she can go higher than you can on the swings."

"I don't swing," Catherine said, setting the bottles of water on the table, completely missing the tears that suddenly brightened Lindsey's eyes.

"It's an experiment. I was explaining the physics of mass, speed, and acceleration and I told her someone whose more massive, like you, can't go as high. Now we need proof, so come on."

"You're more massive. Why don't you swing?"

"Bum arm. It wouldn't be a valid experiment. Come on Cath, where's your scientific curiosity?" Seeing her about to protest again, Sara grinned at her provocatively. "And your sense of fun?" she challenged.

"I'm fun!" Catherine shot back, wondering how they got to a point where she was trying to convince Sara she could have fun. And wondering why Sara's challenging smile was causing her to lose all ability to form a coherent, rational argument.

"Prove it," Sara smirked, sweeping her hand toward the swings. Catherine glared at Sara for a second before grabbing Lindsey's hand and running with her toward the playground. The overjoyed look on Lindsey's face immediately quelled any misgivings she had as they each grabbed a swing and Catherine threw herself into pumping her arms and legs, laughing as Lindsey urged her higher.

Sara wandered over to watch the competition, leaning against the swing support as she judged the relative heights of Catherine and Lindsey. Lindsey was winning, but Catherine was putting in a game effort, and Sara knew she had a huge, silly smile on her face.

The absolute silliness of the swinging competition and Lindsey's uncontrolled laughter was irresistible, and Catherine found herself relaxing and having fun for the first time in weeks. Seeking out Sara, she was surprised to find her there watching them with a huge, sparkling smile. She looked smug, Catherine realized, and she had good reason to, seeing how successful her goading had been. Catherine fake-pouted and was rewarded with the famous Sidle smirk, which turned to full-out laughter when Catherine stuck her tongue out like a bratty kid.

For at least an hour, Lindsey led the two adults through the playground, sweet-talking her mom into getting on the merry go round with her, missing the mischievous light in Sara's eyes until too late, as she caught a handhold and ran them around as fast as she could, ignoring their amused screams. Catherine staggered off, her hair completely windswept, and she took a half-hearted swing at Sara that missed by a mile as she lost her balance. She tumbled right into Sara's arms, her hands catching Sara's shoulders and hanging there as Sara caught her around the waist. The bright Vegas sun lit Sara's already sunny expression and warmed the tones of her hair, and her eyes danced as she swung Catherine around in a circle again, causing her to shriek in surprise. Her swing did connect that time as she pushed herself away, her mock-glare causing both Lindsey and Sara to erupt in peals of laughter.

Finally quitting the playground, they biked back to the cars at a much more leisurely pace, leaving Catherine plenty of time to replay the look of laughter in Sara's dark eyes and the feel of her body, over and over again. The anxious feeling which had been eating away at her in the pit of her stomach resurfaced, but it couldn't drive the giddy smile from her face.

xxx xxx xxx

Catherine lingered by her car as Sara put her bike away. "Um... thanks for coming. Lindsey... really appreciated it,' she stammered, suddenly unsure of what to say but not wanting to say goodbye. "I, uh, guess I'll see you at work."

Sara straightened, her sunglasses hiding her eyes but a smile still pulling at the corners of her mouth. "Yeah," she said simply, swinging the hatchback of her SUV shut.

"Yeah," Catherine muttered, edging away from the vehicle before Sara's voice caught her. "Cath? I had fun today."

"Um, yeah, maybe, ah, we could do it again sometime."

"I'd like that,' Sara replied quietly, trying to put more into her words, and silently cursing her weakness with children. But when Catherine gave her a dazzling smile, Sara had to admit it was more than a promise to Lindsey that made her want to reassure the blonde woman standing in front of her.

xxx xxx xxx

The shift that night was a killer; overwhelmed with new and outstanding cases, the entire shift was working solo. Catherine's routine B&E turned into a 419 during the walkthrough, and she spent almost the entire shift processing the scene, letting the routine of work keep her mind focused. She knew it wasn't any better for anyone else; her pager had beeped twice with requests for CSIs. When she finally staggered into the lab, her knees aching after hours of kneeling on top of the bike ride that day, she just wanted a long, hot shower and a whole day's sleep, both of which she knew was hours off. She dropped her evidence bags at the appropriate labs before heading to the break room, hoping that as crazy as the night had been, someone remembered to keep the coffee pot refreshed.

Sara was leaning over Nick's shoulder as he sat at the break room table, looking at crime scene photographs. Catherine stopped dead in the doorway, seeing how close Sara stood behind Nick, her chest pressed up against his back so she could reach over his shoulder to point to something in the photos and talk quietly near his ear. It didn't help that Sara was wearing a worn pair of jeans and a tight black long-sleeve shirt that fit her body like a glove, clearly outlining the muscles along her back and shoulders as she moved.

"Hey, Cath," Warrick said as he walked up behind her, his low voice startling her, "you ok? You're standing here, zoning pretty hard."

Catherine braced herself against the doorframe as she caught her breath, eyes wide as she stared up at Warrick. "Rick, you scared me." She sighed, feeling some of the tension drain from her shoulders as she did so. "Yeah, I'm ok. Just tired."

A cup materialized in front of her, emblazed with the logo of a nearby coffee shop, and Catherine looked up to find Sara standing beside her, so close she could feel the body heat coming off of the taller woman. "I've got just what you need," she said, and Catherine's thoughts flitted through images of Sara joining her in the shower and sleep she had been contemplating, and she almost lost her grip on the cup Sara was putting into her hands. She couldn't look at Sara with the afterimages of her naked in the shower flashing behind her eyes, so she tried to concentrate on the cup in her hands. "Vanilla chai latte," Sara supplied. "Nick and I heard you call in while we were on a coffee run and we thought you could use it."

Catherine took a small sip; the drink was still steaming hot and it revived her enough to attempt to meet Sara's eyes. "Thanks," she said, losing herself in the dark, soulful depths until Warrick cleared his throat, and she realized how long she had been standing there. She didn't need Sara's amused smirk or Warrick's chuckle to know that a blush was creeping up her cheeks. "Damn, you were zoning again, Cath," Warrick pointed out, unnecessarily.

She rubbed a tired hand over her face. "Yeah, I guess so." She saluted Nick and Sara with her cup, "Thanks guys. I'm going to go check on my evidence." Catherine hurried away from her co-workers, thankful that work provided her such a convenient excuse.

"Hey." Sara caught her in the locker room, running water over her face to try to restore some semblance of order to her unruly thoughts. "You ok? You were acting kinda weird earlier."

Catherine grabbed her towel, patting her face dry as she tried to think of an explanation while she thought through what had just happened. Weird? I was just imagining taking a shower with my female co-worker and then I got caught staring into her eyes. Yeah, that would qualify as weird, she thought.

"Yeah, I'm ok," she replied, still bent over the sink, "just exhausted this shift for some reason." Catherine managed to turn to face Sara, finally, propping herself up on the edge of the sink, and was almost undone by the concern in her eyes. "I'm ok, really. But thanks." Sara didn't look like she was going to let it go, but luckily Catherine was saved by Sara's cell. As she stepped into the hallway to take her call, Catherine escaped past her and found a quiet, isolated lab to work in.

Unfortunately, her mind and body proved uncontrollable the next few days at work. Catherine would find herself staring at Sara at odd, inappropriate moments, like when she bent over to pick up a piece of trace or crouched down to snap a picture at a crime scene, and the increasingly surreal images of Sara that juxtaposed themselves on the what she was seeing evoked a familiar flush in her cheeks and a warmer, more liquid flush elsewhere. Catherine took to avoiding Sara as much as possible and berating herself for inability to stop thinking of her younger co-worker. The worst thing was that what she was feeling was so out of the ordinary for her; Catherine couldn't recall being quite so giddy, so unable to control her thoughts and the catch in her breath, than whenever she caught the slightest glimpse of Sara.

What also didn't help was Sara's frown whenever she caught Catherine staring at her, or her narrowed eyes when Catherine responded with her now-standard excuse of tired. So when Sara crouched down beside her as they processed the DB at their crime scene, Catherine wasn't surprised by her directness. "Catherine, what's going on? And don't tell me you are tired," she said, cutting off Catherine's instinctual response. "I bought that the first couple of days, but it's more than that. And it's me."

"What?" Catherine's head snapped up as she struggled with Sara's words. "Wha... what do you mean?"

"It's me. You've been acting strange and distant all week, but only around me. So what's going on?" There was a pause, and then in a quieter voice, "What did I do?"

Catherine sighed, and dropped her head. "Yeah, we should talk. But," she glanced around the crime scene, noting all the uniforms standing around and Brass walking toward them with his notebook out. "Not here, ok? Later, after shift?" Sara nodded, her face serious. "My apartment?" she suggested, and Catherine just nodded in return, before turning back to work.


	13. Chapter 13

AN: Two things: I've changed a convention in the story and am now using italics to indicate character thoughts when I put them in the first person. And it seems that I'm still not quite through with the angst. And thanks as always for your kind comments and reviews – I still could use more critical reviews, but I really appreciate when people point out specific parts they liked as well. Ok, that was three things. Sorry, now on with the show....

And sorry for the kinda short chapter.

xxx xxx xxx

For the third time, Catherine lifted her hand to knock on Sara's door, only to drop it back to her side again. _If I keep this up, I'll be standing out here all day. But how can I go in there to talk when I don't know what to say? Or actually, I do know what to say, but it's going to sound insane: Sara, I've been thinking about you all the time, fantasizing about you, and I think I want to kiss you. And that's why I've been acting so weird around you. Yeah, that sounds sane and logical._ Shaking her head to get rid of the thoughts that had been circling around her head for the last eight hours, Catherine raised her hand and knocked on the door.

Sara opened the door almost immediately, as if she had been waiting anxiously for Catherine to arrive. Catherine handed her the bag she had been holding. "I brought donuts and bagels," she said brightly, trying for at least a few moments of breathing room.

Sara took the bag and headed back into her apartment. "You want coffee?" Setting out the donuts and bagels beside the fresh fruit salad she had prepared, Sara poured them each a cup of coffee, and they managed to have a somewhat normal, relaxed breakfast, chatting about Lindsey and work gossip. As Sara cleared away the dishes, Catherine wandered out to the living room and settled on the couch, dreading the moment that Sara sat down beside her. When she did, she simply sat there, waiting for Catherine to speak.

"I'm sorry I've been weird lately," she began, stalling for time. "If it helps any, it's me, not you."

"What's 'it'? What's going on?" Sara asked, her expression puzzled. "Knowing what's going on will help."

"I... it's complicated. I'm just feeling... awkward around you." Catherine tried to put a reasonable explanation that would satisfy Sara but wouldn't expose her, her what? _Infatuation? Lust? What exactly am I feeling?_ Hence the reason it was so hard to explain. And through all of this, she wanted to preserve the friendship she had managed to build with her young co-worker.

But Sara, of course, didn't have the same problems being direct. "Why?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know." Her voice was flat, emotionless. "What do you know?"

I know you drive me crazy. I know I want to kiss your lips, touch your body. A sudden realization hit Catherine as she sat, playing with her coffee cup. I've been feeling like this for a long time. As the realization flooded her consciousness, a wave of fear washed through her. "I... I..." 

"You what? What, Catherine?" Sara jumped up on her feet and began to move around the apartment like a caged animal. "What's going on here?"

"I don't know. Maybe if you just give me some time, I can figure this out."

"Figure what out, Cath? You haven't told me anything!" Sara paced behind the couch, her agitated movements nearly knocking a lamp off the table. "I told you, I'm not a yo-yo. I'm not... I can't just keep doing this." She stopped in her pacing, head down, her brow furrowed. "I think maybe you should go," she said quietly.

_I'm going to lose her any way. If I don't tell her what really is going on, she's not going to continue our friendship. And if I actually tell her what's going on, she won't have anything to do with me._ In the sudden quiet, Catherine made a decision; she sighed. "Sara, please... sit down." She looked suspicious, but sat down, twisting in the couch so she faced Catherine. _Once again faced with the woman I, what?_ She wasn't sure how she felt, what to label the feelings that had overwhelmed her for the last week, and she found she couldn't explain, what to say, so the silence stretched again as Sara's eyes grew colder and colder and her mouth... Catherine's thoughts came to a halt as she stared at Sara's lips, and before she could stop herself, she leaned across and captured those lips with her own.

Catherine lost herself in the feeling of Sara's soft lips beneath hers, her warm breath flowing into her mouth, and it was as heavenly as she thought it would be, until she realized that Sara wasn't kissing her back, that her body was stiff and unmoving, her lips were unyielding. Catherine drew back immediately, staring in shock and embarrassment as Sara stared back at her, obviously puzzled. _Oh no, what have I done? _The thought spurred her to action; grabbing her jacket from the back of the couch, Catherine sprang up and headed for the door before Sara's words caught up with her. "Where are you going?"

"Away."

Sara slowly stood and turned to watch as Catherine snapped her purse up from the kitchen island and hurried through the hallway. "You kissed me." In the part of her mind that was still rationally processing what was happening, the tiny part that wasn't screaming, "get out' over and over again, Catherine noted that Sara's tone didn't seem angry or upset. "You're observant,' she tossed back over her shoulder. "Have you ever considered being an investigator?" She had reached the door and was pulling on the doorknob in a desperate attempt to escape, but the door wasn't cooperating.

"I thought you wanted to talk?" Sara's voice was closer, in the hallway right behind her.

"Yeah, well, I think that was a conversation-stopper," Catherine replied. _As well as a friendship-killer. Damn, what is up with all these deadbolts? What can't I just get out of this damn apartment?_ She stopped throwing bolts suddenly, dropping her head down and clenching her arms across her body.

"Why?"

_Why? Huh?_ "Why what?"

"Why did you kiss me?'

"I don't know. I just did. It just happened." How could... Her thoughts a whirl of confusion, Catherine almost laughed hysterically at the thought that Sara was asking for an explanation.

"Catherine... talk to me." Sara's voice was quiet, and so close Catherine could almost feel her breath against her hair. She closed her eyes tightly against the temptation to turn, to look, to lose herself in the dark, murky depths of Sara's eyes, and she said nothing. A light touch on her shoulder was almost her undoing. "Look at me,' Sara breathed.

"Sara...." _Damn it, just let me go._ "I just want to..." She slapped at the offending locks that she couldn't see anymore through her tears. "I have to go."

Wordlessly, Sara reached over her shoulder and worked the locks, and then the warm presence on her back was gone. Catherine swung open the door, letting the bright sunlight into the dark apartment, and stepped out into the hallway, catching a glimpse of Sara standing and watching her with a concerned look before the door swung shut.

xxx xxx xxx

Catherine sat in her Tahoe, staring blankly at the instrument panel, having no memory of getting into the car. Her mind kept replaying the kiss, the feeling of Sara's lips, warm but unresponsive under her own, and it spun in a confused circle over and over. _I did it, I kissed her, damn it, I can't believe I did that, god, it felt so good, damn, why didn't she..._

She jumped as a loud tapping broke her out of her daze. The worried look on Sara's face through the glass snapped her to the realization that she was still outside of Sara's apartment. She tried the window, but it didn't go down, so she opened the door, a slight breeze surprising her with its coolness.

"You are going to get heat stroke," Sara chided gently, but Catherine's confused expression didn't go away. "What?" she asked, looking around as if she wasn't sure where she was or what she was doing.

"Heat stroke. You've been sitting in a closed-up car in 110-degree heat without air for over half an hour."

"Oh."

"Catherine, come inside." Her odd reactions were scaring Sara, and she found herself reduced to trying to coax her out of the car, when what she really wanted to do was pull her out of the car and shake her until she got an explanation for her strange behavior. "We'll talk, ok?" As she said the words, she saw a look of panic cross Catherine's face, and she grabbed for the door a second too late. Catherine started the car and peeled out of the parking spot before Sara could try anything else, leaving her standing on the super-heated asphalt.


	14. Chapter 14

"Rick? Hi, it's Sara."

"Hey, Sara, what's up?" Warrick sat up in his bed, trying to shake the cobwebs from his head. He had barely been asleep an hour when the phone woke him.

Sara realized she had woken him, and bit back a curse, but she had been driving around the last hour and had no other leads. "I'm sorry, I just didn't know who to call."

The worried, almost scared, note in Sara's voice snapped him completely awake. "Hey, no problem," he soothed. "Is something wrong? Are you ok?"

"Yeah, no, I mean..." she stopped, drew a breath, and started again. "It's Catherine. She... you know she's been acting weird lately, and well, she came over this morning to talk." Her sigh of frustration carried clearly over the line to Warrick. "But she acted even weirder and left, and now... I can't find her. I checked her house, work, a couple of bars she's gone to... Do you have any idea where she might go if she's, I dunno, freaking out?"

Warrick frowned, very concerned now. Usually if Catherine had a problem, she would deal with it or come to a friend for help, usually him. "I don't know. Damn!"

"Warrick? Where did Catherine... dance?"

"You think she might have gone back to her old strip club?' he asked, incredulous. He never would have even considered that.

"I dunno. It's just a hunch."

"On the Strip. Place called "Showtime."

"Yeah, I've seen it. Thanks."

"Sara? Do you want me to go?"

"No, I'm the one who needs to talk to her. I'll call when I find her. Thanks, Rick."

xxx xxx xxx

The doorman looked her up and down as he took her cover, taking in every inch and leering at her. Sara immediately wanted to take a shower, but instead she forced herself to smile past the bile rising in her throat and asked him if another woman had been in today. The expression on his face got even more dirty, something Sara would have not thought possible a second before, as he nodded his head and gestured toward the curtain covering the entrance. "Yup, it's ladies night or something." Sara just nodded, afraid to try to form words the way her stomach was clenching. "You girls have fun,' he said as she passed him, and she clamped down on the urge to hit him, hard. Getting arrested for assault was not a good idea, regardless of how good it would feel.

Sara blinked the spots out of her eyes as she adjusted to the dark, smoky interior of the club, spotting Catherine's silhouette easily in the mostly empty club. She was leaned back in a large, soft chair, her hand lightly holding a glass that she raised to her lips every few moments. She was right up front, close to the stage, but the strippers seemed to be ignoring her and catering to the other, male, customers. Sara took a quick detour to let Warrick know she had found Catherine before she slid into the chair beside her, noting the three empty highballs on the table as well as Catherine's 100-yard stare.

"Hey," she said, watching the dancer closest to them grind out-of-time to the music before swinging around a pole. As if noticing her interest, the stripper moved closer and began a set of more intricate moves, none of which Sara found particularly interesting or sexy.

Catherine hadn't said a word, hadn't even looked her way, and Sara tried not to be too obvious as she snuck glances at her, keeping her attention on the stripper for the most part. "You want me to buy you a lap dance?" she asked finally, the humor sounded off even to her ears. Catherine swiveled her head to Sara, her eyes unreadable, before turning back to the stage. The waitress appeared beside her, and she nodded her head toward Catherine's empty glasses before ordering a beer for herself.

As she paid the waitress, she slipped another twenty into her hand, holding it up for the dancer before sliding it under the elastic of her g-string. "I could never have done this," she mused her eyes still trained on the dancer, who looked pretty under the caked, unflattering stage make-up.

"You'd be surprised what you can do when you have to." Catherine stunned her by answering, and Sara bit back a sigh of relief. "When you have no choice. And," she began with a sideways glance at Sara's tall frame, "you wouldn't have done half bad."

Sara sniffed in amusement at that as she pictured her graceless body trying to dance and look sexy. "Yea... no. I would never be able to do it."

"It doesn't really take talent,' Catherine countered, her tone conversational.

"It's not the talent. I wouldn't have the nerve... the courage... to get up there. "

"If you need to eat, a place to live, you could do it... trust me." Catherine knew Sara Sidle; if she put her mind to something, she couldn't imagine her failing to do it.

"I would've starved, lived on the street, and died young." This was said in a flat, low tone, with a certainty that surprised Catherine, and she looked more closely at the hard, set features of the younger woman.

"I don't think so. You do what you have to do." It was a simple statement that reflected her survival instinct, Catherine knew, but she also knew that it was true, at least for her. She would always do what she needed to do to survive and protect herself and Lindsey; it was one of the absolutes she lived by. "You want to know the secret?" Catherine asked quietly, continuing before Sara could reply. "A snort of coke will keep you on your feet and moving so fast you don't even see the people, really, except as disembodied hands holding bills. Dulled the pain of the shoes, insulated you from the creepy looks, and gave you the nerve to go back out there, night after night."

Catherine was surprised by her admission, and even more surprised at how the straight-laced Sara seemed to take it in stride, nodding in quiet agreement and understanding. "Funny, at times I can see you doing this, and other times I can't imagine it. So right and so wrong for you. all that the same time." Sara tilted her beer to show the waitress she needed another.

"It was better than a lot of my other options," Catherine replied, a little coldly. "And it wasn't like I had someone to pay my Harvard tuition."

Sara winced a little at the barb, and answered, in an absolute monotone, "Yeah, my life has just been perfect." Catherine swung to stare at Sara closely, noticing a haunted look in Sara's dark eyes.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean..."

"It's ok," Sara said, her words comforting except for the distant, sad expression that spoke of a deep hurt. She was years and miles away, Catherine realized. Slowly, Sara seemed to return to the present,. Taking a sip of her beer, she said, "You've always made the tough choices and never apologized. That's... admirable. Not... everyone can do that. Not everyone is that strong."

Sara had Catherine's full attention now, but she was back to watching the dancers. _What is she trying to say? Is she trying to say something about us, or her_... It struck Catherine then that she knew so little about her brunette co-worker, that she never even knew how she had met Grissom or where she had grown up. _I know her resume, I know her at work, and I've learned a few things in the last two months, but I really don't know her at all._

Sara's eyes slid over, seeing Catherine watching her intensely, and she said in her deliberately bland voice, "Why did you kiss me?" The diversion worked; Catherine flopped back in her chair as if her skeleton had suddenly given way and she groped blindly for her drink.

"Because it's all I've been able to think about all week." Now it was Sara's turn to swing around and stare at her, in that quiet way she has of showing her surprise. The music droned on in the background, and dancers moved around the stage, but in the bubble surrounding them, everything seemed to have stopped. Until Sara spoke again, shattering the stillness.

"So why did you leave?"

_Sara's lips, warm, uninvolved, that sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, she doesn't want this, the overwhelming need to get away_... "I may not have a lot of experience with women, but I know when someone is responding to a kiss," she replied coldly as she rose from her seat. "You weren't." She saw Sara open her mouth to say something, but she cut her off. "There's no explanation needed – I understand." With that, she headed toward the back entrance with as much dignity as she could muster, squeezing her eyes against the tears that threatened.

Sara caught up with her in the alley as she tried to blink her tears away to find her SUV. "Catherine... hey." Sara put a cautious hand on Catherine's shoulder, feeling the shaking of her slight frame under her fingertips. She stepped around so she was standing in front of the shorter blonde, both hands coming up to cup her face, raising one set of reddened eyes to her own. "Hey," she breathed softly, comfortingly, as she brushed her lips across Catherine's forehead, then the tip of her nose,, and then her lips.


	15. Chapter 15

Thanks to everyone for the kind reviews as always. I appreciate the continued support and interest, y'all. But, Taletha, is that a good 'well, damn' or a bad one? :)

p.s. Noodlejelly's review makes a couple of people who have said that they aren't big on or into this pairing, but are enjoying the story anyway. I take that as very high praise indeed, and I'm stoked that people are willing to take a chance on this. I do play the field when it comes to pairings—wrote a fairly well-received GSR story for example—and I can't stress enough how much I appreciate people's response to my work. Very cool. Thanks.

xxx xxx xxx

The kiss was brief, a feathering of soft skin and warm breath, and when Catherine opened her eyes, Sara's dark eyes were looking at her intensely. "Now do I have your attention?" she asked with a crooked half-smile playing across her lips. Unable to form words in the haze from the alcohol and the kiss, Catherine simply nodded, feeling Sara's fingertips stroke her cheek where her hands still framed her face.

"I'm... sorry about, ah, before. If... you had asked me what was possible during that visit, I..,." That rueful half smile twitched just a little wider and her eyes broke to the left. "would have put you kissing me somewhere under that guy showing up with the Publisher's Clearinghouse check—which I never enter" she emphasized hurriedly, as if cutting off a comment from Catherine, "or the Crique du Soleil deciding to hold an impromptu live performance in my closet-sized bathroom."

Her fingers continued to caress the curve of Catherine's neck, the line of her chin, her cheekbones as the tone of Sara's voice dropped to an intense whisper. "To say I was surprised would be an understatement. In fact, stunned doesn't even begin to cover it. I..."

She didn't get any further in her explanation. Catherine tilted her chin up, returning the feather-light kiss, her eyes open and searching Sara's face for her response. When she drew her head back a little, Catherine, scared that she was going to be rejected again, moved to push her away until she felt Sara's hand sliding through her hair to cradle her head, tilting her head back a little more before capturing her lips. Her hands ended up at Sara's waist, winding around the slight frame, pulling her closer. Sara playfully rained kisses all around her lips, never stopping long enough for Catherine to deepen the kiss. Her groan of frustration earned her a chuckle from Sara, her lips twisting against her own into a smile.

"Um, Cath, maybe I should take you home," Sara whispered against her lips. "This, um, really isn't..." Her glance took in the dirty alley, overflowing dumpster, and rusting Pontiac.

"Mmmm, yeah," Catherine purred. "We could use a little privacy," she said, watching as Sara blushed at the suggestion.

"Um, actually I was thinking of dropping you off so you can sleep." As Catherine's eyes narrowed in suspicion and hurt, Sara continued quickly. "It's late and Linds will be home in a few hours. You need to sleep it off before she comes home." Even in Catherine's muddled brain, she knew Sara was making sense, but it didn't stop the wave of disappointment from sweeping over her. "This, um, can wait. Your daughter can't," she finished gently.

Nodding in quiet acquiesce, Catherine turned toward the parking lot. "Cath, you really shouldn't drive. Let me drive you home."

Sara pulled into the driveway of the small split-level where Catherine had lived for years. The drive over had been mostly silent as both women had been tied up with their own thoughts, the radio loud enough to provide a cover to the quiet in the car.

Catherine turned in her seat to smile at the younger woman just as Sara stuttered out, "So I'll, um, see you tonight?"

"I'm off tonight. Um, tomorrow?"

"Maybe we could, uh, get breakfast after shift? Or something?" Sara added hurriedly, not wanting to seem like she was dictating, but then almost groaning when she realized what it sounded like when she suggested something else.

"I'd like that," Catherine replied, smiling at little at the awkwardness as she leaned over to give Sara a peck on the cheek, and feeling that smile widen at Sara's reaction. Seeing the older woman's eyes glance down at her lips, Sara self-consciously licked her lips, moistening them and let out a shaky breath when Catherine did nothing except perch there, still leaned over the console, for a long minute. "Tomorrow night, then," she whispered, and then was gone.

xxx xxx xxx

Catherine took extra time dressing that night before shift, trying on many different combinations before putting on the perfect pair of dark grey pants that were professional but hugged her hips just right, pairing them with a sleeveless button-down shirt in a rich purple that was just a little tight around the curve of her breasts, even with the top two buttons unbuttoned. Avoiding her perfume, as much as she wanted to put it on, she lightly powered her face and added a slightly darker shade of lipstick than she normally wore and surveyed her results. _Perfect_, she thought. _Now if I can just get rid of these butterflies in my stomach, I'd be all set. I can't believe I'm even more nervous about going to work and seeing Sara than I was last week. I didn't think that was possible._

But once she got to work, she couldn't find Sara. The locker room was deserted, as was the break room, and Catherine had the sudden suspicion that she was either way late for work or way too early. Just then, Nick and Warrick appeared in the doorway of the break room, arguing over the spread for some football game. "Hey Cath," Nick called as he strode to the coffee maker, before stopping in his tracks to stare at the cup holder in front of Catherine. "Did you bring us coffee?" he asked, his grin wide enough to light up the room.

"Yeah, I did," she replied, extending a cup toward Nick and one toward Warrick. "Dark roast with a shot of espresso and a large Americano." Both the men took their cups gratefully and sank into chairs around the table. "So anyone seen Sara?" she asked, nonchalantly as possible as her heartbeat raced at the mere thought of her co-worker.

"Yeah, I saw her in with Greggo a few minutes ago," Nick piped up as he took a cautious sip of his coffee.

Catherine stood hurriedly and snatched up one of the remaining cups. "Um, maybe I should take her her coffee now, before it gets cold." She strode through the halls quickly, taking a corner too fast and just managing to not run down the person coming from the other direction, but not also managing to avoid brushing against the papers in their hands, causing them to go flying. _Damn_, she thought as she dropped to her knees to start gathering up the scattered papers. "Sorry about that," she said, and then cut off her next sentence as she realized that Sara was kneeling next to her, also picking up papers. Sara looked up as well, and she saw Sara's eyes widen as she also realized who she had run into.

"It's ok..." "I brought you coffee..." They spoke at the same time, eliciting a nervous chuckle from Sara. Catherine handed the cup to Sara, almost dumping it on the younger woman as Sara juggled the papers and the cup. "Sorry," she said again, feeling a blush make its way across her cheeks. _This is going well_.

Sara, for her part, was trying not to gape at her blonde co-worker as she took the coffee cup in suddenly nerveless hands. _Wow, she looks great. That color looks great on her, brings out her eyes and cheekbones._ She glanced down at her creased jeans that she hadn't had time to change in the last 24 hours and the loose peasant shirt she had barely looked at when she had gotten dressed the day before. _And I look like shit. Perfect_.

"It's ok," she repeated. "Thanks." Catherine took the papers from her hand and straightened them as they rose to standing, taking in Sara's rumpled clothes and tired lines around her eyes. "You ok?"

"Yeah, yeah, just a hot case. I, um, stuck around today to go over some trace since Hodges was backed up." She accepted the papers from Catherine and they continued back the way Catherine had come, walking so closely their shoulders brushed with each step, breaking apart only when reached the room and walked in to sit with their co-workers.

"Sara," Nick chided gently, "don't tell me you stayed here all day to work with that trace."

She smirked at him. "Ok, I won't tell you."

He glared at her, but knew criticizing her work habits would only get him into more trouble. "So where are we?"

She sighed. "Standstill. The impound guys are bringing the car around in a couple of hours, though. Might give us something to work with."

"Ok. Grissom came by already and said we're to continue working on this case since there's nothing new yet, so you should go take a shower and get freshened up before we go over the evidence again." Sara opened her mouth to protest, but he cut her off. "Sara, you look all grungy."

Horrified, Sara risked a quick glance at Catherine, who wasn't looking at her, but had caught Nick in a death glare. "Manners, Nick, manners," she snapped, feeling satisfied when Nick's face contorted into a horrified look of his own, and he mumbled a scared 'sorry' to Sara before bolting from the room.

"Errr, um, I guess I had better go take that shower," Sara mumbled, beating her own hasty retreat from the break room, leaving Catherine to Warrick's amused grin over the lid of his coffee cup.

xxx xxx xxx

Later, Catherine paused outside of the layout room, where Sara was hunched over the table, staring at a bunch of leaves as if she were waiting for them to speak to her. She had obviously showered, as her jeans and loose shirt had been replaced with a pair of straight-legged black pants that highlighted the angles of her body and a black-and-grey body shirt that hugged every inch of her torso like a glove. Forgetting the reason she had been passing by, Catherine leaned against the doorframe and engaged in some overt staring. If she had been any less caught up, she would have stopped herself from such a public display of ogling her co-worker, but at that moment, nothing was further from her mind.

"What?" Sara's question startled her out of her fantasy, the rich warm tones of her voice complimenting the private smile gracing her lips as she stayed bent over her work.

"Oh, um..." Catherine cast about for anything remotely work-related she could use to pass off her behavior, but nothing came to mind. She took a couple of steps into the room, casting a hasty look behind her to make sure the coast was clear. "I was just admiring how gorgeous you are."

_What? She, what? Gorgeous?_ Sara had felt Catherine's eyes on her, but she had been totally unprepared for the compliment, and she whipped her head around to frown at the blonde standing over her. "Oh, yeah, right," she snorted, rolling her eyes. _There was Catherine, dressed to the nines and looking great, and she was just lucky the change of clothes in her locker had looked remotely good with each other and weren't too badly wrinkled. _

Catherine leaned in closer, whispering, "You know, I just thought of a new use for the layout table." She watched Sara's face, hoping for a flush of desire to match the one that she knew she had.

Sara's reaction took her completely by surprise. Sara's frown deepened, and she let out a sigh of exasperation. _What, is she upset that we're at work? Is she reconsidering?_ That last thought caused Catherine's breath to stop in her throat, and she found she couldn't meet Sara's eyes as she straightened and turned to face her.

"Come on, Cath," Sara said, a trace of disbelief in her voice. "You really don't have to try so hard."

"What?" Catherine shook her head and spread her hands wide, trying to communicate her complete confusion.

"Gorgeous? Are you kidding me?" Sara kept her voice low, but made sure Catherine heard every word. "I'm not exactly the type to inspire, um, out-of-control urges or lust-filled fantasies... in anyone." She gave a weary sigh. "So don't try, ok?"

Catherine knew her mouth was hanging open as the quiet vehemence in Sara's words registered. _She really doesn't get it_. Sara had moved back to study her leaves, obviously trying to ignore her now. "Are _you_ kidding _me_?" Catherine asked with equal vehemence. She laughed at little at the irony. "I... you... I've been... for days!" She took a deep breath, trying to get her thoughts into order. "I can't think when I'm around you. I deliberately touched you when I helped you change." Sara looked up again, then, eyes wide with shock. "In fact, I've used all kinds of excuses to touch you or be near you for weeks now. I, I feel like a school girl with my first crush, I'm giddy when I think about seeing you and then when I see you, I..." Her eyes drifted down the layout table, knowing that Sara read her thought by the sudden nervous way she bit her lower lip. "Yes, gorgeous. And irresistible. And a bunch of other words I can't think of right now because I'm standing beside you."

Sara's expression was one of a cornered animal trapped in the headlights of a car. "Uhhh..."

"There you are!" Nick exclaimed from the doorway, causing Catherine to spin around so fast she almost toppled and Sara to jump back, bumping her hip against the table with a solid thump. "Man, I have been looking all over for you." Nick suddenly noticed the odd tension in the room, and he looked between the two women, puzzled. "Um, impound dropped off the car.'

"Oh, oh, ok."

Nick was disappointed by Sara's lack of enthusiasm; usually she loved working in the garage. "It's totaled and the owner is dead," he said enticingly, "You know what that means..."

A glint and a predatory smile suddenly graced Sara's expression. "Power tools."

"Yup!" He smiled, but then noticed a glance exchanged between the two women. "So long as you are done here?"

"Um, I think so," Sara stammered, looking to Catherine for confirmation.

"Yeah, we'll, ah, finish our conversation over breakfast."

Nick interrupted Sara's nod. "Breakfast? Cool, I'm there. Rick coming too?"

Catherine cast a 'sorry' look at Sara and was happy to see she looked as disappointed as Catherine felt. "Um, sure, I'll tell him."

Sara caught Nick's arm to pull him out of the room. "Come on, that car isn't going to process itself." As they headed down the hall, Catherine overheard Sara suggest to Nick, "Hey, wanna see if Greggo wants to learn to dismantle a car?"


	16. Chapter 16

AN: Sorry I'm taking a bit of time to update this. Things are a little hectic. And, Taletha, thanks for clearing that up (grin).

xxx xxx xxx

Catherine sighed in irritation over her coffee cup as Nick tried to convince Sara to go out on a blind date with a friend of his. Even though Sara had cut off every attempt he had made before, he never seemed to give up. Sara was in the process of shooting down his arguments one-by-one when he came out with what he thought was is winning argument.

"Sara, you might as well go out with this guy."

"Why?"

"Well, it's not like you are dating anyone else."

Sara swung her head up, suddenly, from her coffee cup, just barely managing to avoid shooting Catherine with a guilty look. _Oh, damn, I did not cover that well. _The curious expressions on both Nick and Warrick's faces, coupled with the amused grin that seemed to be teasing Catherine's mouth, told her she was in big trouble.

"Oh, it's on now," Warrick laughed, as Nick chimed in with a "You are seeing someone? Who?"

_Um, let's see, denial, not gonna work. The truth...no, absolutely not. Say nothing accompanied by a death glare? That usually works, but not this time._

Nick had started going through the list of every guy in the lab and PD during her panic attack, as Warrick and even Catherine commented on the romantic possibilities. Sara glared at her for her betrayal, and reconsidered telling the guys the truth. _Hey, guys, it's just that Catherine has been chasing me around the layout table and smooching on me during the off-hours. Not sure where it's going, but it's definitely better than your frat-boy friend, Nick, sorry. Yeah, that would definitely get rid of that smirk on her face. Kill any chance of the two of us, but it would be funny._

"David?"

"He's definitely interested in Sara," Warrick opined, "but she'd never go for that."

"Vartann?"

"Mmmmm, any woman would go for that," Catherine purred. She wished she had a video camera to capture the way Sara's face went from an annoyed glare to a jealous narrowing of the eyes back to conniption fit in the space of a minute. Jealousy, she noted, looked good on her.

"Nick," Sara was surprised by how level her voice was; she was pretty sure that if he didn't stop talking in the next minute, she was going to have to get rid of a body. "If I'm seeing someone, that's my business. The last time I let you all know about my social life, work—in the form of a severed finger—ended my first date, so excuse me if I'm not overeager to share other details of my life with you guys." Nick and Warrick had the decency to look abashed at the reminder. "And if I was dating anyone, trust me, it's not a guy from the lab." _That, at least, was the truth._ "And finally, regardless of my dating situation, I'm never going out with one of your frat-boy pals."

"Hey!" Nick looked insulted by that last. "Those are good guys."

Sara exaggeratedly cocked her eyebrow. "You turned out ok, but most of the guys you talk about sound like they never left the frat house. Or they desperately want to go back to a time when they were young, drunk, and boorish." She tapped her finger on the table to emphasize her point. "Not. My. Type. Got it?"

"Damn, she schooled you, bro," Warrick said into the silence that descended onto the table. It held for another minute before Nick himself started to chuckle. "Maybe not boorish, but I'll give you young and drunk."

A wave of weariness washed over Sara as the conversation turned to Nick's friends. After a minute or two, she excused herself and headed to the restroom for a minute of quiet. Leaning over the sink, she splashed some cold water on her face, trying to restore some semblance of wakefulness. She jumped when she opened her eyes to Catherine's reflection in the mirror in front of her.

"Damn, Cath," Sara cursed as she tried to calm down, scrubbing her face with a paper towel.

"Sorry. Are you ok? You've been in here a while," Catherine explained, trying, for the moment, to avoid making it sound like she was asking about the dating conversation._ Because if you ignore the elephant in the room, it will go away, right?_ Sara rubbed her face with her palms, and Catherine noticed the dark circles under her eyes and the exhaustion in her tall frame._ I forgot she just got off a triple. Damn._ "Of course you aren't," she said, answering her own question. "You need to go home and go to bed."

Sara felt a rush of energy bolt through her at the word, 'bed,' and she saw she wasn't the only one who had a sudden mental image as Catherine blushed and she found something extremely interesting in the bland grey cubicle wall, anything besides looking at Sara, who, exhausted and worn, still looks good enough to eat.

"Ummm, yeah, I should sleep," Sara agreed as she took a step closer to the blonde in front of her.

Catherine gave a nervous chuckle. "You know, I never really realized how convenient a women's restroom can be for, um..." She wiggled her eyebrows suggestively.

"Yeah, it can be... convenient."

Catherine couldn't resist closing the distance between them and pressing a soft kiss against Sara's lips. "I've been wanting to do that for 48 hours,' she sighed happily. "But you know the guys are already wondering what happened to us."

"Yeah, now might not be the best time for making out in the women's restroom at Denny's." Sara smiled smugly as Catherine's blush intensified. "Some other time, maybe."

Sara started to walk by Catherine to the door, when Catherine caught her arm and pulled her in for a deep, long kiss that left them both breathless. "Oh, you can count on that," she said, winking as she left Sara staring after her, speechless.

xxx xxx xxx

That night, Sara was out in the field almost all night, and Catherine wasn't sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. _I'm not ogling a co-worker, good. But I'm not ogling Sara, bad. No layout table fantasies, good. No form-fitting shirts, bad. Ability to speak because she's not in the room, good. Sara not being in the room, bad._ She finally gave up her attempt to have the list give a definitive answer, since all it was making her think of Sara anyway, which she had to admit was bad for her concentration. Luckily, her case kept her attention most of the time, except for those odd moments when she was driving to the PD or waiting for lab results.

Catherine was disappointed when the end of shift neared, and she hadn't seen Sara at all. She bagged and tagged her evidence, putting it away for the next shift with a sigh of frustration before she headed to the locker room. As she walked by a row of lockers, she stopped dead at the sight of Sara pulling her shirt off, her black bra stark against the pale skin of her back. Forcing herself to close her mouth, Catherine pretended to be casual, especially since she knew Warrick was in the row beside them. "Oh, hey, Sara, I didn't see you around tonight. How, um, was your case?"

She jumped, and swung around, the shirt she was trying to button flying open at the movement. "Catherine, you have to stop sneaking up on me like that," her voice louder than normal as she tried to process that Catherine had once again surprised her and was standing there staring at her breasts. In the locker room at work, no less. She pulled the fabric of her shirt closed, giving Catherine a comical cut-it-out look as she motioned in the direction of Warrick. "You are going to give me a heart attack one of these days," she said, her voice returning to normal as she turned away from Catherine to button her shirt. "Our case is interesting, but nothing conclusive yet." Sara chattered about the case while Catherine opened her locker, taking out her purse. Warrick finally walked by, waving at the two women as he left.

Silence ensued as Sara's nervous chatter died, until they both closed their lockers and faced one another. "Ah..." "Umm..." "You want to try..." "Are you interested in..." "breakfast without the boys?" "getting something to eat?"

Sara erupted in peals of laughter first, Catherine joining her after a second. They sank down onto the bench beside each other, chortling heavily. Wiping the tears from her eyes, Sara glanced at Catherine. "I feel like I'm in high school again," she groaned, "and I really thought I left those days behind me."

Catherine hopped up, extending her hand to Sara. "Come on, let's go eat."

xxx xxx xxx

After the suggestion of a nightcap, Catherine found herself back on Sara's couch, nursing a highball of Scotch. Aware of the bed not 10 feet away from where they sat, Catherine kept a careful distance between them, once again unsure of herself. They were talking about music, the conversation light, and Sara seemed to find her cup of tea interesting because she was paying careful attention to dunking her teabag. A stray lock of hair slipped down from where it was tucked behind her ear, and Catherine reached over, marveling at the smooth, soft skin under her fingertips as she pushed the lock back into place. That one light touch was the necessary spark, as Sara's head snapped up, looking at Catherine with a startled expression.

Catherine took the cup of tea from her hand, setting it on the coffee table without moving her hand from Sara's face, her thumb caressing Sara's cheek as her fingers curled under her chin. Sara's hand mirrored the movement, coming to rest on Catherine's neck as she pulled her closer. The space between them evaporated as they met in the center of the couch, lips and then bodies pressed tightly together.

Winding her arms around Sara's waist, Catherine slid her hands over the muscles of her back, feeling Sara shiver in response. Sara had pushed Catherine back against the cushions of the couch, using her advantage in height to tilt Catherine's head back and gain access to her mouth. She sucked her full lower lip into her mouth, pleased by the low moan in Catherine's throat. Catherine pulled the shirt out of the waistband of Sara's pants, finally stroking the skin like she had imagined in the locker room earlier.

But suddenly the pressure on her lips and body was gone, as Sara pulled back, a serious expression on her face. "Cath, should we slow down or something. I..." She didn't get a chance to continue, as Catherine took advantage of the opportunity to push her back into a sitting position, straddling Sara's thighs as she slid onto her lap. Pushing her hair and head back, Catherine smothered her words with her mouth and tongue. "You are so beautiful," she breathed into Sara's skin.

"Really?" The quiet question surprised Catherine.

She pulled her head up and floated her fingers along Sara's cheekbones, watching as the ghost of the touch made Sara's breath catch. "Really," she whispered when Sara's eyes sought hers. The serious look had returned as Sara gazed up at her and Catherine wondered what she saw. Unable to admit to insecurity, she fished for a complement. "What about me?"

A secret smile pulled at the corners of Sara's mouth in the pause before she spoke with quiet conviction. "You are beauty personified. The essence of beauty made flesh and placed here on earth for mere mortals to admire from afar."

Catherine forgot to breathe for long moments, and could only press a soft kiss on her lips in reply. Finally, she broke the silence, teasing, "Whatever school of sweet talk you went to, Sidle, wow, you are good."

"It was the truth. No need for sweet talk." Sara's fingers trailed up and down Catherine's spine, enjoying the feeling of her skin under silk. Licking her suddenly dry lips, she gazed up into Catherine's blue eyes, clouded with desire. "I always thought you were beautiful."

"Really?"

"Really. From the moment I met you." Catherine continued to run her hands through Sara's hair, caressing the back of her neck and shoulders with each pass. This time it was her turn to nibble playfully at Sara's lips.

"Sleep with me?"

Catherine laughed quietly at the question. "I think we're getting there."

"Sleep, no sex," Sara correctly quietly, hoping Catherine would understand, or at least not question. Catherine leaned down for another soft kiss, and then slipped off her lap, extending her hand to lead Sara to the bedroom.


	17. Chapter 17

Sorry for the long time between updates. School gets busy right around this time, but I hate leaving people hanging for too long. I hope this was worth the wait. (grin)

xxx xxx xxx

Out of habit that she had acquired from long practice, Catherine woke a few minutes before the alarm beeped, turning it off before it could wake the slumbering form beside her, before she relaxed back into the warmth of Sara's arms encircling her waist and her body snuggled up against her back. Catherine smiled to herself when she remembered those last few clumsy moments before they had laid down, as Sara had verbally stumbled over how to offer pajamas, and her eyes widening comically when she turned to make the offer to find Catherine already beginning to undress.

"Um, Cath, you want… pajamas?" Catherine had already stepped out of her pants and thrown them over a chair back, watching Sara's nervous, but decidedly hungry look, as she watched her strip. Catherine fought the urge to perform a striptease, knowing that any provocation on either of their parts would send them both over the edge, and while Catherine wanted that, she also wanted to make sure it was the right time. _Now is not the right time. But soon…_

The quiet worry in Sara's voice when she had asked if they could sleep had warned Catherine not to push as hard as she wanted, and while she wished she knew what Sara was worried about, she had decided to let Sara tell her in her own way. "Yeah," she replied as Sara pulled out the linen pajamas out and started to rummage around in a drawer. Catherine moved to the foot of the bed, standing right behind the taller woman so she could wind her arms around Sara's waist. "Why don't we share?" she suggested, deciding that while she had agree to be good, she wasn't going to be too good. After all, she had her reputation to think about.

"Share?" Sara's voice was patently disbelieving.

"Yeah," Catherine whispered against her back as she slid her hands up so Sara's shirt slowly hiked up. "You told me you liked to sleep in boxers, so I assume that means you like to sleep topless." Catherine heard the audible gulp as she exposed more and more of Sara's skin to the chill air of the apartment. "And I like sleep shirts so… share." She whipped Sara's shirt off with a flourish, recreating the view from the locker room earlier.

"Cath…." Her nickname came out a cross between a warning and growl as she teased the smooth skin under her mouth with her tongue, nibbling delicately at Sara's shoulder.

"Please?" The teasing note in her voice left, and Sara caught the change.

"Ok," she agreed. "But I'll warn you, these scars are not pretty," she admitted, turning and trying to avoid self-consciously covering the offending area with her hands, the small pockmarks dimpling her arm and shoulder at irregular intervals. As if the body in question was not her own, Sara watched as Catherine ran her hands along the scar tissue that was slowly fading to a dull pink instead of the angry red. She was surprised when Catherine caught her eyes and purred, "You're beautiful," and even more surprised when a warm finger cut off her next words. "Really." Catherine's mouth replaced her index finger for a slow, lingering kiss. She finally let them breath, glad to see Sara's eyes glazed from the kiss, and she smirked as she said, "So, ready for bed?"

Sara's glare didn't quite hide her rueful grin as she handed Catherine the pajama top and watched pull off her tight t-shirt.

They finished changing quickly after that and slid under the covers, snuggling their bodies together, Sara wrapped around Catherine's back and her face buried in the sweet, strawberry smell of Catherine's hair. Catherine had been surprised at how quickly she had dozed off, soaking up the heat from Sara's body. And here she was again, soaking in the warmth, but knowing she had to get up. _I could get used to this_, Catherine thought as she ran her fingertips lightly over the back of Sara's hand, _really really used to this_. She still had a few qualms, and occasionally a voice in her mind questioned what she was doing getting involved with a co-worker, much less a female co-worker. She had never dated a woman before, and she had to admit she was surprised at how quickly she had transitioned from the idea to the actuality of being in Sara's bed, but then she thought of these moments and knew. _This just feels so right. I don't know why, I can't explain it, but this is right._

Rousing from her ruminations, Catherine eased Sara's arm up so she could slide out of the embrace. _Sara has the night off, and_, pausing to look at peacefully face, _I'm not going to wake her_. Catherine risked a brush of her lips on her forehead, smiling at both the impulse and the fact that Sara slept through it, before changing her clothes and heading out to pick up her daughter.

xxx xxx xxx

Catherine's phone vibrated at her hip, an angry buzz that cut through the gossip she had been exchanging with Nick. With an apologetic look, she brought the phone up to her ear as she exited the break room. She hadn't checked the name, but she wasn't surprised to hear Sara's throaty voice on the other end.

"Missed you when I woke up." There was a pause on the other end and Catherine let her find her words. "I should be used to waking up alone, but suddenly, I'm not." There was a hint of self-deprecating laughter in Sara's voice, like the admission of wanting or needing someone was an admission of weakness, and Catherine understood. Everything was going so fast, and neither of them seemed to be able to put on the brakes.

Glancing around the hallway to make sure no one could overhear, Catherine sighed. "I never had such a hard time leaving someone sleeping in my life. Usually, I'm good at that," she admitted. "No strings, no complications…"

"Yeah." Another long pause stretched between them, as neither seemed to want to voice their thoughts.

Catherine finally broke it. "Sara?" _I've got to be the one—I don't know what's going on with Sara, but she's terrified of getting hurt. The Gil thing, maybe, or that woman in San Francisco. Something…_

"Yeah?"

"I miss you… I'm so used to seeing you at work." _Should I tell her I wish I could walk in on her changing again? Mmmmmm_…

"Hey," her usual greeting took on a deeper tone as Sara asked, "you wanna come by for breakfast? After shift? I slept so well, I was going to run to the grocery and cook… something."

Catherine could almost see her shrug her shoulder and her eyebrows shift down as she realized she didn't know what she was cooking, and her agile mind going over the list of things she might fix. "Whatever you fix sounds good. I'll see you about 8?"

"Sure." Catherine was surprised by the quick reply, as if Sara expected her to refuse. _All the chasing I'm doing, and she's acting like I'm not interested?_ Catherine suppressed a sigh, and instead said, "I can't wait," putting all the warmth she could into her voice.

"Me too."

Catherine closed her phone reluctantly and turned, almost running into Warrick who had walked up behind her while she was on the phone. He laughed, shaking his head. "You too?"

When Catherine looked at him, puzzled, he explained, "First Sara gets a new guy, and now you? Love must be in the air."

Smiling a secret smile, Catherine nodded and her head and agreed, "Must be."

xxx xxx xxx

Work had been filled with the usual horrors, death and stupidity, including a teen dying of neglect. Catherine was actually glad she hadn't had Sara working with her that night, since Sara took domestic cases hard at times, and the case had been sad and sickening and Catherine was glad to leave it behind at work and just soak in the sunlight as she sat at the breakfast bar and watched Sara putting together a breakfast casserole. And even though her stomach growled, a different hunger dominated her thoughts.

"Stop that," came Sara's gentle admonition from where she stood with a whisk and a bowl, her back to Catherine as she bent over the kitchen counter, her hair pushed back behind her ears.

"Stop what?"

"Devouring me with your eyes." Sara finally turned to face Catherine, a knowing smirk on her face. "Besides, you'll ruin your appetite if you have your dessert before the meal."

Catherine let her eyes roam over the slim figure in front of her, the tattered, low-slung jeans, the tight crimson Harvard t-shirt, and licked her lips, "Dessert, huh?"

Sara's cheeks tinted pink, but stood her ground. "Maybe… if you clean your plate." Seeing the look in Catherine's eye, she said, "And if you have a hearty dinner, you'll have energy for later."

"Well…" Catherine drawled, "that's a more convincing argument than your first one."

"Uh huh." Sara turned back to her bowl, pouring the ingredients into a casserole and completely missing Catherine padding up behind her. She started when Catherine's arms circled her waist and her mouth fastened on her neck. "Hey!" Her body played the traitor as it relaxed back into Catherine's embrace. "I thought you said that second argument was convincing," she said weakly as Catherine's tongue teased her ear, her breath leaving her body in one long exhalation.

"I said it was more convincing, but not convincing enough," Catherine whispered against the warm skin of Sara's neck. She saw Sara catch her lip between her teeth and felt her weight shift back even further as she blew lightly in her ear.

"I need to work on my persuasion techniques, huh?" She turned in Catherine's embrace, her stormy dark eyes meeting Catherine's as she lowered her mouth.

"Let's just say I'm more persuasive," Catherine said as she wound her arms around, snagging the belt loops of Sara's jeans, keeping Sara's body tight against hers as she started a slow retreat to the bedroom.

xxx xxx xxx

Ok, more soon—you won't have to wait as long for the next chapter, I promise.


	18. Chapter 18

Ok, I lied. It took me a long long time to give you this next chapter. Sorry about that – I caught this nasty head cold and I've had a heavy travel schedule, so I haven't had near as much time to write as I would like. Oh, and this is where I earn the R rating, big time. I hope it's not too much for people who usually don't read femme slash.

xxx xxx xxx

Catherine's slow walk back to the bedroom ended when her knees hit the edge of the mattress, and she toppled down, keeping her hold on Sara's belt loops so she fell on top of her. Releasing her hold at last, Catherine slid her hands up under Sara's shirt, enjoying how Sara squirmed against her as she dug her fingernails into the soft skin along her spine. Catherine hiked up her shirt more with every trip up and down her spine while Sara seemed content to feather light kisses along Catherine's cheekbones and eyelids. She was unsure how long they laid their, lazily touching, exploring and kissing, the touches and kisses light and airy but it seemed like hours before Catherine felt the kisses get more insistent. _Funny_, she thought, _after all my impatience, I could lie like this forever. I've never felt so cherished, so special, so… loved._

Sara sucked her lower lip into her mouth and lightly sucked and nibbled at the soft flesh until Catherine's lips parted in invitation. The passion of that first deep kiss surprised her—given that she had been doing all the pursuit, Catherine had harbored fears that Sara wasn't as interested in what was happening between them as she was. But she tasted the raw need and want as Sara explored every inch of her mouth until she was breathless and moaning, digging her fingernails into the smooth skin beneath her hands and feeling Sara's back arch in response. The kiss ended, leaving both of them panting. "God, Cath…" Sara gasped, her voice a low, harsh whisper as Catherine twirled her fingers into Sara's hair and pulled her mouth back down.

This time, Catherine gave as good as she got, battling with Sara's tongue for the chance to explore in a competition to see who could cause the other to squirm, moan, or gasp as their hands got busier and more aggressive. When Catherine got too much of the upper hand, though, Sara would break the kiss and come at her lips from another angle, a strategy that worked until Catherine realized that being on the bottom afforded her easy access to long muscles of Sara's stomach and the swell of her breasts above. Flicking an experimental thumb across Sara's nipple, Catherine felt her stomach muscles contract and a sharp inhalation disrupt the assault on her lips, and she smiled her triumph.

"Cath…" her name came out a cross between a moan and a growl as she increased the speed of her thumb, alternating between quick, playful flicks across the sensitive flesh and gentle squeezes. Sara's labored breathing sounded in her ear as she sucked and nibbled at Catherine's neck, unable to hide the hitch in her breath every time Catherine's fingers discovered a new way to tease and touch. Catherine's fingers finally left her breasts, sliding up her back to finally rid her of the light cotton tank, but Catherine realized her strategic mistake when Sara's hands trapped hers above her head as she finished pulling the fabric off. One hand held her hands up while Sara's mouth descended further down her neck, along the collar of her shirt, and down between the swell of her breasts. Suddenly, it was her turn to squirm as Sara pulled her shirt down just enough to cover the tip of her breast with her mouth. Sara's warm breath began the subtle assault, followed by a gentle sucking and another breath that seemed to travel up and down her spine. She struggled, then, against the gentle restraint of Sara's hands, unable to be so still and passive as the fire raged up and down her body. Sara didn't relent, and Catherine could feel her smile against her tender skin. Sara moved between her breasts, using her mouth expertly, tongue, lips, and teeth playing along her flesh as Catherine moaned, wordlessly, mindlessly, lost in the sensations.

She had no idea how long she had laid there under Sara's mouth and hands before Sara moved back up her neck to her mouth, but Catherine was sure days had passed. She managed to catch a few breaths before Sara's mouth fixed on hers again. As she did so, Sara shifted her weight, and Catherine used the opportunity to flip her on her back, straddling the younger woman's hips with her legs as she smiled down at the beauty of Sara's eyes clouded by passion as well as her pert breasts. Sara watched as Catherine's smile turned teasing, and she reached for the hem of her shirt, pulling it up to show more of the skin at her waist, slipping it further and further up as she seductively ground her body against Sara's hips. When Sara reached to touch her, or pull the slowly inching shirt off herself, Catherine caught her hands and pushed them back against the mattress with a shake of her head. "You can't touch the dancers during a lap dance," she explained with a sultry smile before she began a different groove with her hips and shirt, raising the fabric until the bottom of her breasts were exposed. Sara's eyes followed each centimeter of exposure, feverishly, her fingers gripping the sheets tight enough to tear, as Catherine kept up her slow tease.

When she finally had the shirt off, Catherine leaned over, her hands catching Sara's to keep them above her head as she offered first her mouth and then her breast to Sara, who took advantage of the opportunity. She teased Sara for a while, until every touch of Sara's tongue made her breathless, and she slid down their bodies to lay on top of the taller woman, taking tiny pecks at her lips as she tried to regain control of her senses. Sara rolled them over again, resting her body between Catherine's legs as she returned to the light, soft kisses, slowing the tempo, as Catherine's fingers stroked her back, from her shoulders, down along her spine, to the smooth skin of her lower back, just inside the waistband of her jeans, until her hands ventured further south, sliding under the coarse fabric to cup Sara's ass and pull their bodies closer, incredibly close. The kiss deepened, and their movements began to take on a new urgency as Sara undid Catherine's trousers, her back arching to help as Sara shed the garments, her hands sliding around to undo Sara's button-fly.

Once they were both naked, Sara began another slow journey down Catherine's neck and body, stopping along the way to nuzzle her breasts and nibble on her hip bones, before kissing her way down her thighs and back up again. Catherine finally moaned her name, a pleading note in her voice, as she tangled her hands in Sara's hair, trying to direct her to the place that needed her attention most. She felt Sara's smile against her stomach as she teased her way lower, the tension in Catherine's stomach and back building with every kiss.

When her breathing finally calmed and her eyes opened, Catherine found Sara had gathered her in her arms, holding her tight as the tension drained from her body. Again, the feeling of being completely and utterly loved washed over Catherine, and she luxuriated in it. But the feeling of Sara's naked body against hers cut through the lassitude as she rolled over so she was facing Sara, pleased to see her sudden move surprised the woman beside her, a gasp escaping her lips as the speed of Catherine's recovery caught her off guard. Catherine slowly explored Sara's body with all of her senses, touching, tasting, and smelling as she learned the places and sensations that made Sara's body squirm or her breathing catch or her hips buck impatiently. When Sara's words had become one long pleading moan and her stomach quivered with the lightest touch of Catherine's fingers, Catherine finally gave her release, shocked by the loud groans and near screams issuing from Sara. Snuggling against her back, damp now with sweat, Catherine marveled again at how much she didn't know about this woman in her arms, and how she wanted to spend however long it took to find out everything about her.

xxx xxx xxx

The sun was shining into her eyes when she woke, her body surprisingly satiated and sore until Sara remembered what had happened that morning. Catherine was still curled around her, and she dropped her head back down to the pillow heavily. _I can't move_, she thought tiredly. _I may never move again. Mmm, that would be nice, to lay here with Catherine forever. I wonder how we could explain that to Grissom_. She smothered a chuckle at the thought of his expression, and Catherine woke to that huge smile lighting her face. She snuck a kiss over Sara's shoulder, pleased to see the smile widen even more for her. "Morning," Catherine whispered, not wanting to break the mood, her fingers already tracing a lazy circle along Sara's abdomen. When her hands reached up to cup her breasts, Sara laughed a little, breathlessly, and caught her wandering hands and pulled them back down to her stomach and held them still. Catherine slid up until Sara could see her pout and she tickled her fingers against Sara's skin.

"Cath…"

"Sara," Catherine whispered as she leaned in to nibble on her neck.

"Mmm, Cath, you have to…." Sara's sentence was cut short by Catherine's tongue teasing her ear. "Uhhhhh, Cath…" she tried again, getting even fewer words out this time.

"Have to what?" Catherine asked conversationally as Sara's eyes rolled back in her head and she took advantage of her distraction to move her hands back to cup her breasts.

"Have… to… stop," Sara panted out between deep breaths.

"Why?" Catherine toyed with her body, finding this expressive, passionate side of Sara an unanticipated surprise, and one she wanted to see as much as possible.

"Work," Sara got out.

"What time is it?" She kept the conversational tone to her voice, knowing she was driving Sara crazy.

"Cath, please…" Sara pleaded, helpless as Catherine sought out her sensitive places with her hands, quickly building her up and loving the effect she had on the younger woman. When Sara could finally roll over and glare at her, a smile teasing the corners of her lips, Catherine managed her most innocent expression for all of three seconds before collapsing back into giggles.

"We now have _less_ than an hour to get showered and get to work," Sara accused her, "and you have to run home."

Catherine sat up in the bed, letting the sheet fall off so Sara could see her in all her glory and was happy to see an appreciative gaze sweep over her curves. She leaned in and gave Sara a light kiss. "No, I don't. I'll shower at the lab." She hopped out of her bed and pulled on her clothes in an amazing show of speed. "I'll see you in an hour," she called as she headed out of the bedroom.

xxx xxx xxx

"So…" Greg broached the subject with Sara carefully, "what are you so happy about?"

She gave him a puzzled look. "What do you mean?" Sara had just made it into work with three minutes to spare, such an unusual occurrence for the workaholic who tended to be hours early for every shift that everyone was commenting on it. Coupled with her unusually sunny disposition and the rumors swirling around about a new man in her life, the lab grapevine was been buzzing for hours while she had been out in the field. When she had come in from working a solo B&E, still with a huge smile, Greg couldn't contain himself.

"So what's his name?"

He got the classic death glare that told him he wasn't getting anything out of her, so he finally gave her the results she was waiting for. Her trademark smirk replaced the huge smile for just a minute before she left his lab.

"So, do we know who the lucky guy is?"

"Huh?" Nick looked up from his results, the change of topic taking him by surprise. Warrick's eyes narrowed as he tried to follow Greg's line of thought.

"Sara's new guy. She's looking like a girl who just had got lucky, so there must be a lucky guy out there somewhere tonight."

"What?" Nick looked as confused as ever, while Warrick chuckled.

"You think Sara's in a good mood because she had, um…"

"I'm saying she's in a state of post-orgasmic bliss, yes," Greg stated firmly. Nick's eyes bugged as he contemplated what Greg was saying and he gulped. Warrick shrugged his shoulders, not being one to rule out anything.

"Who?" All three turned to see Hodges in the doorway of the lab. Greg blushed, and nobody answered, but Hodges looked at them with narrowed eyes. "You think Sara had sex?" Greg glared at him, but he just shrugged it off. "Could explain her mood," he said blandly, shrugging his shoulders again before disappearing from the doorway.


	19. Chapter 19

AN: Ok, another apology for not updating very much lately. I've been on the road a great deal the last couple of months and haven't had the time or energy to work on this. Which is somewhat unfortunate because I've been thinking up some fun plot twists to beat my normal inclination to end the fic when the two characters get together. So if you are feeling like this should end now and not go back into the land of angst, let me know. I worry that overly-long fics might be boring for the audience. Or maybe I should stop soon and write the next bit as a sequel.

xxx xxx xxx

"What??" Sara's exasperated tone explosively cut through the break room's silence, but she couldn't take Hodges' sideways glances at her one more minute before she clobbered him one. Nick's head shot up as she spoke, and his eyes widened in horror as he saw who Sara had fixed with an immobilizing glare. Hodges' made a bland face and shrugged, but the corners of his mouth twitched up, and Nick read the expression correctly.

"Oh, Sanders said you looked like you were in a state of post-coital bliss or something like that," he told her off-handedly, taking the moment she was rendered speechless to scrutinize her face carefully before shaking his head dismissively. "But I don't see it."

Nick would have laughed to see Sara's head lowering like a bull about to strike, but he knew any sound would bring her wrath down on his head, and he really didn't want that. While Sara recovered her voice to shriek "He said WHAT?", Nick slipped out the door.

"You better run," he advised the young man from the doorway, grinning as Greg looked up from a surfing magazine in confusion. "Sara just caught Hodges looking for evidence of 'post-orgasmic bliss' and he ratted you out." Greg's eyebrows hit his hairline as his mouth dropped to the floor. "I imagine she's on her way here." Greg's panicked scramble got him out of the door before Nick even had a chance to move, and he sprinted down the hall to parts unknown, leaving Nick to amble along after him, in the direction the garage where Warrick was working on a car.

A couple of hours later, he was cursing his impulse to help Greg out as he looked around the DNA lab fruitlessly for his results. Warrick stuck his head in and shook h is head. "Still no Greg? Man, where is that guy hiding?" he asked as they made their way down to the break room.

"Yeah, this is getting ridiculous," Nick agreed. They saw Greg standing over the coffee pot, looking anxiously around him as he waited for his coffee to brew. Warrick caught Nick's eye and indicated the lab that Sara had been working in a few minutes prior as he continued into the room.

"Hey man, been looking for my results."

Greg spared him a glance as he kept up scanning the hallways, "I can't go back to the lab. Sara will find me." He turned back to the coffee maker, muttering under his breath for it to hurry. Warrick caught movement out of the corner of his eye, and stepped over to block Greg's view of Sara heading toward the break room.

When she reached the door and effectively had him trapped, Warrick discretely eased himself out of the door just as Sara said "Hey Greg" with a definite edge in her voice. He caught one last look at Greg's terrified face before moving out of sight of the room, bumping into Nick as he did so. They shared a conspiratorial smile as they listened in on the scene in the break room, where Sara was systematically taking Greg to task for starting rumors, invading her privacy, and speculating on her social life, among other things.

This is how Catherine found them a couple minutes later. "Have you guys seen Greg?" she asked curiously, "I need to get some blood evidence to him and he's AWOL from the lab." She caught Sara's voice rising in the break room, and she cocked an eyebrow at them both for an explanation.

"Um, give him a few minutes. He'll be back in the lab shortly," Nick laughed. Warrick filled in the rest. "He, um, said something about Sara's mood within earshot of Hodges, who passed it along to Sara. He's been hiding from her since."

"So you arranged for an intervention?" Warrick's smirk said it all. "What did he say about her mood?"

"Oh, that she looks like she's in a state of post-orgasmic bliss or something like that."

Catherine didn't hear the rest of Nick's explanation as she fought to keep from laughing, blushing, and declaring that she was the reason Sara was in such a good mood, all at the same time. Instead, she stifled a chortle with her hand, wishing she could see Sara's face right now. And Greg's. Sara would be livid and Catherine could imagine Greg cowering in a corner while Sara lambasted him from top to bottom. After a particularly quiet but lethal comment from Sara, she grinned over at the guys. "Do we think Greg will get out of this alive?"

Warrick answered her grin with a wink. "He better hope he was right about her mood. That's about the only thing that might save him."

Silence descending on the break room gave them a second to scatter before Greg rushed by, making a beeline for the lab where Grissom was standing, an annoyed look on his face. Catherine saw Sara slip out of the break room herself, heading in the direction of the locker rooms and she followed, catching up with her splashing water on her face. Catherine picked up the towel and leaned against the adjacent sink, handing it to her when Sara extended her hand.

"So…" Catherine began carefully, not sure about Sara's mood, "I hear Greg's been hiding from you." Sara groaned into the towel, still bent over the sink as she scrubbed her face.

"Tell me…" she said finally, "why my social life is the subject of such speculation?" She peaked out of the towel to give Catherine a sideways glance, "And why, given your glow, why aren't the same rumors circulating about you?"

Catherine smirked, teasingly. "I have a glow? Really?"

Sara's eyes narrowed a second before she threw the towel at Catherine, who caught it and whipped it back at her head, giggling as they tussled over the towel. When Sara finally collapsed back against the sink, her ironic half-grin and cocked eyebrow speaking volumes: amusement, satisfaction, and just a hint of embarrassment.

"Well, for one, people are used to me having a glow," Catherine explained, to Sara's strangled outraged laugh. "And," she hurried on, "I'm not as secretive about my personal life, so people aren't gossiping about me and trying to figure out what I'm doing all the time."

The ironic half-smile returned. "So you are saying I should tell everyone?" Her eyes danced above her smile, challengingly.

"What would you tell them?" Catherine asked, propping her hip against the sink so she was facing the taller woman, who matched her movements so they were smirking at each other across the slowly closing distance.

Sara reached out to toy with a button on the collar of Catherine's shirt, watching her catch her breath at the unexpected move, and slide a little closer, tilting her chin up. "I'd think of something," Sara muttered as their lips met. They sprang apart when a loud voice in the hallway startled them, and Sara dropped her head, lips stretched tight by a grin she was trying to hold in. "We probably shouldn't… "

Catherine licked her lips, tasting Sara's peach lip gloss, slowly letting the realization of where they were penetrate her suddenly lightheaded brain. "Yeah…" She headed to the door, pausing as she grinned back at Sara. "Oh, by the way, the fact that you didn't kill Greg today is being taken as evidence that he's right about what's causing your good mood." She ducked out and closed the door just as the towel hit it.

xxx xxx xxx

Catherine sighed as she slid down on the bench in front of her locker. Exhaustion settled into her muscles, and she rotated her head, trying to relieve the tension. Warm hands settled on her shoulders and started to knead the muscles there. She leaned back, exhaling a long 'mmmmmm' as a particularly tight knot was soothed. The shift had gone from a fairly dull night to a sudden rush of cases, and everyone had doubled up. Catherine's second case had gone fairly easily, and she was one of the lucky ones, getting to go home almost on time.

"Better?" Warrick asked, his hands still working on her back.

"Yeah," she replied, dreamily. "Thanks, Rick. Are you out of here?"

He chuckled, and patted her arm. "Nope. I'm just in to change my shirt and get to work processing the trace from my second scene."

"You seen Sara?"

"She's out at that multiple at Red Rock with Grissom and Nick. It's going to be hours before they even get back to the lab, I think."

Catherine sighed. She had wanted to say goodbye before she left. "Ok, thanks, Rick." He shut his locker door with a clang and headed toward the exit. "I'll see you tonight."

xxx xxx xxx

The thin sheet of paper fluttered down as Sara swung open her locker, the pale lavender paper surprising in a workplace of computer printouts. She unfolded it, catching a whiff of the perfume Catherine usually sprayed on at the end of a shift.

_Hey, sorry we won't get a chance to continue our locker room conversation. See you tonight. Breakfast after shift tomorrow?_

_-C_

Sara's weary smile turned up the wattage as she read Catherine's careless scrawl, and she inhaled the scent from the paper one last time before sticking the note in her bag and heading out of locker room, determined to get a few hours of sleep and a shower before shift that night.


	20. Chapter 20

And not to be foreshadowing or anything, but this chapter is based on a few lines from Doria Robert's song, Perfect, which reminds me that things rarely stay perfect for long.

_Let's take a picture now_

_I do not want to forget_

_The way you look at me_

_When everything is perfect_

_A perfect memory_

_Of when things are so good_

_And everything has worked out _

_Just the way we knew it would_

xxx xxx xxx

Catherine stretched, sighing in frustration as the evidence yielded no further clues to the identity of the serial purse snatcher who was getting increasingly violent with the women he stole from. He had struck in five separate hotel or shopping mall parking garages, seemingly choosing his victims at random over the course of two weeks. The escalation was troubling; the last victim had ended up in the hospital with a broken jaw and concussion. The only consistent thing about the attacks was the uncanny ability of the perp to avoid video surveillance and the lack of evidence he left at the scene.

She rolled her head on her shoulders and propped her chin on her hand, staring at the wide-angle pictures of the crime scenes, trying to imagine where and how the perp had managed to surprise the women, two of whom had been on guard since the story had been on the news. Unbidden, thoughts of Sara overtook her concentration; instead of the crime scene photos, images of Sara wandering into the break room for coffee at the start of shift, the black button down short-sleeve shirt and black pants already showing creases, indicating that she had been in the lab for a couple of hours already. Catching Catherine staring as she turned from the coffee machine, the slight blush on her cheeks, and her knowing smirk, made Catherine wish for a camera, to catch the perfect picture of Sara Sidle: tired from a lack of sleep, overworking herself again, slightly wrinkled and bare of makeup, but beautiful, wearing her clothes like a model, carefully propped against counter, and relentless, every inch of her body poised and intense, her mind churning on a case behind the dark eyes that smoldered as they caught Catherine's over the lip of her coffee cup.

_I can't believe what she does to me. _She had started to stand, to do what, Catherine didn't know, when Nick and Greg came into the break room. To cover, she went to pour herself a cup of coffee, brushing shoulders with Sara as she poured, and then reaching behind her back, lightly running her fingers along her waist as she found the sugar. The deliberately casual stance shifted a little, so that Sara's hip bumped Catherine's, almost causing her to drop the sugar in response. Shift hadn't even started yet, and already Catherine couldn't wait for the end.

"The case must be looking up." Warrick was propped in the door of the layout room, his arms folded across his chest.

"Huh?" Catherine looked up, coming out of her reverie slowly. "Um, no, it isn't the case."

"Really?" He took a couple of steps into the room to look over the photographs spread out on the table. "You and Sara are quite a pair."

"What?"

Warrick went on, in his amused voice. "Yeah, she's all blissed out on some new guy and now I catch you staring off into space with a huge smile on your face. Must be something in the water."

Catherine concealed her exhalation. "I guess so. Who ever thought Sara would start dating?"

xxx xxx xxx

They made it through the door of Sara's apartment just barely. As soon as the rest of the world was locked away, Catherine pushed Sara up against the wall, kissing her soundly while starting on the buttons of her shirt. "I've been wanting to do this for hours," she confessed against the skin of Sara's throat as she parted the fabric to run her fingers along Sara's belly. Sara's fingers were already tangled in her hair, pulling her head back for another kiss.

"Who knew getting coffee at the beginning of shift could be so fun?" she quipped, inhaling the strawberry scent of Catherine's shampoo. "But I thought we were going to get breakfast?"

"Later," Catherine growled, stopping Sara's teasing with her tongue and hands. They made their way to the couch, shedding clothes as they did so. The shrill buzz of Sara's pager cut through the quiet of the room, and she silenced it and threw it on the chair in one smooth motion, without even pausing in her assault on Catherine's lips. Her cell phone rang a second later.

"Sidle," she said into the mouthpiece, breathlessly, as Catherine nibbled on an earlobe. "Grissom… Grissom!" She broke into his recitation of an address where he wanted her to meet him. "Call Nick. I'm busy."

At his startled 'what,' she cut the call short and turned off the phone, tossing it over to join her pager as Catherine began to chortle. "What?"

"You are never going to live this down. Sara Sidle, SuperCSI, refusing extra work time."

"I'm busy," Sara repeated, lowering her mouth to catch Catherine's nipple between her teeth. Catherine wound her hands in Sara's hair, holding her mouth there, as she forgot about work entirely.

Later, Sara snuggled against Catherine's back. "I can't believe we didn't make it to the bed."

Catherine lifted her head and looked around the sun-filled apartment. "I'm surprised we made it to the couch, myself." Scooting back, she caught Sara's hand and pulled her arms tighter around her stomach. "Did you ever have that perfect moment? The one you want to stop time for, and just exist right then until the end of time?" Sara was silent, prompting Catherine to continue. "I remember feeling that way the first time I held Lindsey. She was so tiny, and sleeping, her fingers twitching as if she wasn't used to the feeling of air on her skin. I remember thinking that I never wanted anything to touch her, keep her just like that forever." Sara brushed Catherine's hair back, to press a kiss to her temple, unsure of where Catherine was going with this. "Think we could stay here forever?" she asked, her tone serious.

"No," Sara answered, equally seriously, "but we have a few more minutes."

Catherine smiled softly at that, taking in everything, the fluttering of the curtains and the play of light on the carpet, Sara's warm breath and warmer body against her back as she slid into sleep.

xxx xxx xxx

"Tell me it isn't true." Nick's words caught Sara as she was putting her bag into her locker. She straightened, giving him a confused look.

"What?"

"That Grissom called you while you were… um, indisposed, and you told him to call me." Sara opened her mouth to protest, while he continued with a southern-preacher drawl," because I think Sara Sidle turning down work is one of the first signs of the apocalypse, right before the horsemen ride."

"I was busy," she said, blandly, her tone belying the cocked eyebrow and half-smirk that caused Nick's mouth to drop open and shake his head. "I knew it! The world is going to hell in a handbasket." He laughed, giving Sara one last mock-disproving shake of his head before heading out of the door.

Sara finished putting her jacket away, looking at the few pictures that she had taped up there, one of the ocean to remind her of her home by the bay, a dog she had had when she was young, and she imagined one of her and Catherine there, her arms snaked around Catherine's waist and her head on her shoulder, both of them smiling and happy, maybe laughing at something the photographer said, caught in one of those perfect moments that Catherine had been talking about earlier. Absentmindedly stroking the surface of another photograph, she imagined the two of them, prominently displayed for all to see. Finally, she swung the door shut and headed out in search of coffee.

_I bought a picture frame_

_And I made room on the wall_

_I hold you close to my chest_

_Cuz I made room in my heart_

_You ask me what I'm doing _

_Displaying our love_


	21. Chapter 21

**AN:** Given the recent events of Nesting Dolls, I thought this was rather timely. Sorry for the short chapter. Next chapter will be up soon.

**xxx**

Catherine paced the halls of the lab like a caged animal. She had been pacing in Trace, until Hodges had finally ordered her out of the room with a promise to page her the instant he got any results for her. Coffee had long since stopped working its usual magic, but the outrage and anger churning in the pit of her stomach continued to propel her through the halls. Sara had tried to talk her into going home, at the end of the double shift, but that had been right after post, and then there had still been some hope of quickly finding the monster who had brutally attacked and murdered the young girl with the bright, soft blonde curls, which were now covered by a sheet in the morgue. She was eleven, a child, blonde with pale skin, and the before and after pictures of the girl haunted Catherine. She knew she couldn't rest until whoever did this was locked away.

"Cath…" Sara's voice called to her from the hallway outside of the DNA lab. Catherine turned, barely taking in the rumpled clothes and deep, dark circles under the taller woman's eyes. All she saw was the sheath of papers in her hands. "We got the trace back." Sara's lips pulled into a grimace, and she shook her head sadly. "Nothing probative."

"What?" Snatching the papers out of her hands, Catherine scanned the contents quickly. "How can there be nothing?" Her eyes seemed to focus on the figure in front of her, to finally see her for the first time. "And why did Hodges give these to you? He was supposed to page _me_ for this." She shook the papers in Sara's face angrily.

"I'm the lead on this case, Catherine. He's supposed to page me." Her soft tones were meant to soothe Catherine's anger and take the sting out of the words. "Look…" she began.

"Yeah, and we need to get that fixed." The rancor in Catherine's words shocked Sara speechless and she could feel her mouth working but no words came out. Waving her hands as if she were washing her hands of the whole conversation, Catherine started to turn, saying, "I'm going to go see Grissom."

"Catherine!" The quiet force of Sara's tone stopped her in her tracks. Stepping closer to give their confrontation some measure of privacy, Sara kept talking. "You've been working this case non-stop for 32 hours. And…" she said, cutting off Catherine's attempt to interrupt, "Lindsey gets out of school soon. You need to go, pick her up from school, and forget about this case for a while."

"Don't tell me what to do," Catherine hissed in response.

"If you don't leave now, I'll remove you from the case." Sara's hard features softened a little as she tried to explain. "You're too close. You need to step back."

"There's a little girl on a slab who needs me to find out what happened to her. That's not too close. That's my job. And I'm senior to you which means that you don't get to tell me how to _do my job_." The last bit was said between clenched teeth.

"That little girl needs you?" Sara's finger gestured wildly in the direction of the morgue. "THAT little girl?" Against her will, Sara's voice rose. "Catherine, she's _dead_. She has no more needs. But there is a little girl who does need you and she's standing outside of her school waiting for her _mother_ to pick her up."

_SLAP._ The sound of her palm striking Sara's cheek didn't even register with Catherine. "How DARE you tell me how to take care of my daughter."

Sara stood her ground, her dark eyes glaring into Catherine's light ones, ignoring the red mark that was spreading across her cheek. "Well, obviously _someone_ has to." Her words seem to hang in the silence that had descended onto the hallway for a long moment before Sara turned and walked away, past Nick and Warrick who stood at the end of the hallway watching the two women in shock. Both of them cast an incredulous look at Catherine before following in the direction Sara had gone.

The anger drained from her frame in a second, and Catherine felt her legs start to give way underneath her. Her palm stung curiously and she rubbed it absentmindedly with her other hand. _What did I just do?_ Unfortunately, she didn't have any time to think through the events that had just transpired as she heard the quiet footfalls of Grissom coming up behind her. His simple, "Catherine?" conveyed both his questions and concern, and she dropped her head into her hands in response.

"I… she… was right. I have to go. I… Lindsey." She was already walking toward the exit as she babbled, her thoughts chaotic. Grissom's quiet voice cut through some of the chaos as he said,. "Catherine, take the night off. Spend time with Lindsey and get some sleep." She had stopped her headlong flight to nod in his direction, acknowledging his instructions. "Report in the morning after you drop Lindsey off at school." On that note, she left, and Grissom sighed, tapping the folders against his hand as he went off in search of Sara.


	22. Chapter 22

Grissom found Sara in the break room, where Nick and Warrick were trying to question her about the confrontation with Catherine, but she didn't seem to be in the mood to answer any questions. "Look, things got a little heated. End of story." She tried to walk past them, but they didn't budge. "Excuse me," she said, glaring at them both.

"Sara," Grissom's quiet voice cut off what was brewing to be another confrontation. "I'd like to see you in my office." A sharp exhalation from Sara indicated how thrilled she was by the suggestion, but Nick and Warrick finally let her past to follow her supervisor down the hall. "Close the door," he said as he seated himself behind the desk. She did so, but propped against the door, deliberately not getting comfortable. "Catherine left to go pick up Lindsey. I told her to take the night off and report in the morning. I thought that would give the two of you a break from each other." Sara nodded, a bit surprised by his politically astute move. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"No, not really," she sighed, staring at the ground and worrying her bottom lip with her teeth before meeting his eyes. "I'd like to go back to working on my case."

"You've been working on that nonstop, same as Catherine. Do I need to give you the same advice you gave her?" he asked, pointedly, staring at her over the top of his glasses with a raised eyebrow.

"No. I'll back off if I need to." Her level gaze conveyed confidence in her assertion, and he decided not to fight her on it. He nodded, glancing for one last time at the angry red handprint on her cheek. She nodded in turn, and turned to head back to her lab space. "But, Sara? When this case is over and both of you have had some sleep, all three of us are going to discuss what happened here today." Her nod seemed resigned, but at least she accepted the suggestion.

A few hours later, only three hours before the end of her regular shift, Sara was ready to call it a night. She had been over the vic's clothes two more times, yielding no further evidence, and all the coffee she had drank was making her cross-eyed and light-headed. Packing the evidence box, her mind had already strayed to the idea of a hot bath and a glass of wine to relax her when her phone rang. She let the vision fade as Brass reported an abandoned vehicle found a few miles from the dump site. It was probably a dead end, but Sara could feel the adrenaline giving her a boost, better than any triple latte.

**xxx**

"I have blood on the back seat and in the trunk," Sara straightened from where she was bent over the seat of the car to look over at Brass. "It's possible that this is the vehicle used to transport our vic. However," she huffed in frustration, "the VIN on the vehicle has been obliterated by something, maybe a metal sander, and the license plate has been removed."

"So there's no way to quickly identify the owner?" Jim's own frustration leaked into his words. "Damn."

"And it looks like the car has been wiped down to remove fingerprints," she continued, holding up a rag in an evidence bag. "There are these footprints, all around the vehicle, and they go off in the direction of that gas station we passed on our way." Sara's eyebrows scrunched together thoughtfully. "What was that, about 4 or 5 miles up the road?"

"Yeah, about that. I'll get an officer to go canvas the station, see if anyone saw anything."

"Yeah," she replied, absentmindedly. "Oh, and get this car towed back to CSI. Catherine can process it."

He cast her a look as something in her voice told him she was up to something. "And what will you be doing?"

Slinging a camera over her shoulder, Sara motioned in the direction of the footprints. "I'm going to take a walk." Brass started to call to her, but stopped, knowing that trying to talk her out of it would just end up with one of her death glares. Instead, he turned to the uniformed officer standing nearby. "Do you have water in your car? Good. Follow her with your flashers to make sure she doesn't get hit and make her drink a bottle of water every half hour. Call me if she gives you any trouble, ok?" The officer nodded seriously, but Brass could see he was hiding a grin. He shook his head, helplessly, and pulled out his cell phone.

**xxx**

When she reported to Grissom in the morning, Catherine didn't know what to expect, but compared to the tongue-lashing or silent disappointed look she was expecting, his quiet explanation of the car waiting for her in the garage was anticlimactic to say the least. In some ways, she had actually wanted to be yelled at, thinking that if someone verbalized the thoughts that were going through her head, the mantra of how many ways she had fucked up might quiet, just a little bit. When she had asked where Sara was, her question hesitant, he simply told her that he thought Sara was still out at the scene. Catherine headed to the garage, glad that she hadn't had to explain the scene with Sara to Grissom yet, and disappointed that the din in her head was in no way lessened. But she wondered what could possibly be taking Sara so long at the drop site.

**xxx**

Brass watched for the hundredth time as Sara bent over to place an evidence marker, snap a picture, and scan the ground ahead of her intently, and he stifled a sigh of boredom. He had taken over from the uniform about an hour into Sara's 'walk,' and he was beginning to regret his decision. Sara seemed supernaturally focused on following the footprints which had disappeared and reappeared along the side of the road for over three miles, and he wondered if she actually thought she was going to find something, if she was being this doggedly determined because so far the case seemed dead-ended, or if she was just delaying her return to the lab. Any of the motivations seemed possible. He, at least, was in the air-conditioned SUV; Sara was down to a tank top in the direct morning sun.

Noticing that Sara had wandered off the shoulder, stooping and taking pictures in a smooth, practiced motion, and was headed toward a rock formation a dozen meters away from the road, he put the car into park and followed, careful to avoid the footsteps that she was following.

"Find something?" he asked, trying to look over her shoulder as she snapped a pair of gloves on and scanned a crevice in the rock with her penlight.

"Maybe," she replied, frowning in concentration, and then reaching into the crevice with her right hand, coming out with a small crescent wrench. She quickly secured the wrench in a bag, and handed it to Jim, handing him a second, larger evidence bag as well. "Hold this for me, will ya?" she asked as she leaned closer to the rocks, straining to reach something that seemed just out of her reach. Turning her body to get her entire arm in the crevice, Brass thought he heard a grunt of triumph as she pulled her arm out of the rock. He held the bag and she dropped a license plate into it, finally meeting his eyes with a small smile of satisfaction. "Run that number for me, will you?"

He called it in while she straightened and dusted off her jeans. "How did you know the perp would leave the license plate out here somewhere?" he asked as he hung up.

"I didn't. But it seemed like a long way to walk with something in your hands."

Sara shrugged, and then started when Jim caught her arm and steered her toward her SUV. "You're bleeding," he said by way of explanation, pointing to her shoulder where she had scraped it against the rocks to retrieve the license plate. He cleaned the cut, ignoring her irritated glare as he took care of her. "So are we done out here?"

Glancing in the direction of the road and then back at him, she nodded. "Yeah, I think so. I should go back to the lab and fingerprint those."

"Good." He motioned her into the SUV, catching her puzzled expression as he circled around to set behind the wheel. "What? I had one of the uniforms drive my sedan back to the crime lab an hour ago." Blithely ignoring her exasperated look, he handed her a bottle of water. "Now drink this and take a nap while I drive us back."

**xxx**

Sara disappeared into the lab as soon as Jim handed her the keys, but he didn't immediately drive back to the police station, since he knew dispatch would call him if they got a hit on the license plate. He had been surprised when Sara hadn't argued with him—much—about driving, and even more surprised when she had fallen asleep almost as soon as they were on the road. She had looked embarrassed when he had had to shake her away when they arrived at the lab, and her quick exit robbed him of a valuable opportunity to tease her about her snoring.

Instead, he ran into Catherine in the DNA lab, worrying her bottom lip as she watched the hallway in the direction Sara had gone. He caught her up on the case, both saddened and relieved when she told him the blood found in the car was indeed their vics, but that she couldn't get much more than a couple smudged partials from the car, and she wasn't sure that they would be enough to get a hit on AFIS.

"Well, let's hope Sara has better luck," he said, heading to the door. Pausing in the door, he threw a comment back to Catherine, saying almost conversationally, "You know, that handprint on her cheek finally faded."

**xxx**

Sara leaned her head against the glass in the observation room, exhaustion finally washing over her. Her shoulder stung from the scrape, and her face and neck felt sunburned, even though she had put sunblock on. Catherine and Brass were in the next room, slowly teasing a confession out of the boyfriend of the vic's mother, an interview she knew she should be doing, but her mind had ceased to be sharp hours before, not long after she had raised the prints from the license plate and wrench and confirmed a match to the name Brass supplied from the vehicle registration. So she just stood there, her forehead resting against the cool glass, watching the case close in front of her.

Grissom slipped into the room and gave her a wry smile. "You look beat." She simply grunted, too tired to form words, and he shook his head. "Go home. Take the night off." After one last look at Catherine, whose clipped voice showed how carefully controlled she was keeping herself, Sara physically pushed herself off of the glass and started to shuffle toward the door. "You did a great job on this case," he told her retreating back.

"Thanks," she said quietly, stepping out into the hallway and heading toward the doors. _I'm not avoiding Catherine_, she lied to herself as she cleared the building without running into her co-worker, _I'm just exhausted and need a good night's sleep before I talk to her_. But the honest part of her brain chided her, _yeah right_.


	23. Chapter 23

The door swung open to Catherine, standing in the doorway, hugging herself as if she were cold in the 100-degree heat. If she hadn't known better, Sara would have sworn that the lines that seemed etched around the corners of Catherine's hard-set mouth and the dark circles underscoring her pain-filled eyes had appeared since she had seen her last. "Cath, hey." Sara was unnerved by the fact that Catherine didn't reply, didn't even seem to see her. "Come in," she continued, moving out of the way so Catherine could make her way into the apartment. Gesturing at her wet hair and robe, she said, "I'm just going to go and dry my hair. If I don't blow it dry immediately, it goes crazy. There's coffee. I'll be out in a minute."

Sara hurried into the bathroom and turned on the hairdryer, trying desperately to quell the inner voice that was telling her she was still avoiding Catherine. The truth was, she had woken up late after collapsing as soon as she had gotten home yesterday, and hadn't even begun to think about what she would say to Catherine. And now, she was running late for work and Catherine was in her apartment, ready to talk. She turned off the dryer and leaned against the sink, staring at her reflection in the mirror for a moment, but looking into her own eyes yielded no answers, only more questions.

"I'm just going to change…" she began as she came out of the bathroom, only to stop dead in her tracks when she realized Catherine hadn't gotten coffee or sat down to wait for her; in fact, she hadn't moved from where she came in the door at all. Approaching carefully, Sara called her name softly and touched her arm to get her attention. "Catherine?" she repeated, a little louder.

Pulling her arm out from under Sara's hand, Catherine's arms tightened across her chest, as if to protect herself. "I don't… I don't… know what to say." She still wasn't looking at Sara and her voice was as close to an emotionless parody of her normal warm tones as it could get, but she kept talking, as if the words were gathering momentum as they spilled from her mouth. "I can't say I'm sorry, there is no sorry, no _words_, to even begin to make up for an… _assault_." The acid in her tone on that last word scared Sara more then the rest; Sara was no stranger to self-loathing and recognized it when she heard it. "I hit you and there's no going back from that."

Unable to listen to that dead voice, Sara cut off the flow of words with a simple, "No." When Catherine finally turned her head to look at her, her eyes focused for what seemed to the be first time since she had entered the apartment, she continued. "There is no going back from that." Nodding wordlessly, Catherine shuffled around, heading for the door, but Sara caught her arm, forcing her to turn around and meet her eyes. "You're right, Catherine, you don't go back and pretend something didn't happen. You deal with what's happened and move forward for that." Catherine blinked once, twice, trying to comprehend Sara's words, blinking back the tears that threatened as well, until a choked sob escaped her throat, and she gave in. Arms circled her behind her head and she buried her head in the soft cotton of Sara's robe.

When the wracking sobs lessened, she felt Sara gently leading her to the couch. A moment later, a tissue box appeared on the coffee table, along with two steaming cups of coffee. "I still don't know what to say," Catherine began. "I, you know, Eddie and I, we argued with our hands as well as with our mouths, sometimes. I thought, just with him." The cry had released something that she had been holding deep inside her, a frozen core of fear and anguish, for the last two days, and she could finally look at Sara without trepidation. "I don't want to be the person I was with him," she said, firmly, seeing the understanding in Sara's eyes. "I can't be that person again."

"You aren't. And you won't be."

"But I…"

"I won't let you, Catherine." Sara's voice rose. "I would never hit you, and I won't be your punching bag. So you will never be that person. With me. But that doesn't mean that we can't be together, it just means that we need to make sure that that doesn't happen again." Sara sank back against the cushions of the couch, surprised a little by her outburst. She had been more angry than she had realized, and she exhaled shakily. "Understand?"

"You are more forgiving than I deserve."

Sara snagged her cup of coffee from the table, sipping the bitter warmth to give her a moment to think about Catherine's words. The self-loathing lingered there, in Catherine's tone, and it worried Sara. "No, I'm not. We're… both volatile people, and I provoked you." Catherine opened her mouth to protest, but Sara shook her head. "I knew what I was doing. I was pushing your buttons to try to get through to you, to get you out of that avenging angel mode. And I knew exactly which button to push."

"Lindsey."

"Yes. That was unfair of me."

"That still doesn't excuse my response."

"No, no, it doesn't," Sara agreed.

They lapsed into silence for a moment, Sara's thoughts going to the moment Catherine had swung her hand. She hadn't really been surprised by the blow; she had known that Catherine would react—badly—to the suggestion that she was neglecting her child. She wished she had gotten them out of the hallway before the argument had erupted so the incident could have been just between the two of them, and not, as it was now, speculation for the entire lab. Lost in thoughts of her own faults, Sara missed Catherine's increasing agitation as the silence stretched.

"I, I should go," Catherine blurted out, reaching for her jacket and purse. Startled out of her reverie, Sara almost missed Catherine's arm when she grabbed for it. In her lunge to keep Catherine from running away, Sara misjudged the distance, catching Catherine's wrist but unbalancing herself as she half-stood, half-leaned across the coffee table. Falling, she managed to twist herself around and keep a hold on Catherine, so she thudded to the floor in the narrow space between the coffee table and the couch, with Catherine in her lap. For a shocked moment, they just stared at each other, until Sara's mouth twisted as she tried to contain her grin and Catherine began to giggle. They collapsed into each other, laughing uncontrollably.

Finally, as they quieted down, Sara managed, "I was trying to get you to stay."

"Mission accomplished," Catherine retorted, starting a fresh wave of chuckles. Sara's hand had found its way into Catherine's hair, smoothing it down, before leaning her head in to rest against Catherine's forehead. "Hon, it's ok. We'll figure out different ways to argue, ok?" she whispered into the quiet. Sara heard Catherine's sigh, and then her head rocked in a small nod. "I just can't be that person again," she repeated, in the same hushed tone Sara had used.

"You won't, I promise."

Reluctant to leave the embrace, Catherine rested there on Sara's lap, her eyes closed and so still, Sara almost thought she had fallen asleep. Finally, she exhaled slowly, opened her eyes, and pressed a light kiss to Sara's cheek. "Thanks," she breathed against the soft skin as she leveraged herself up and onto the couch. "I know you keep your promises."

"Huh?"

"Lindsey told me."

"Oh."

"At least now I know it doesn't take you an hour just to get two sandwiches." Catherine sighed, remembering how reluctant Lindsey had been. "when I got there to pick her up, I suddenly realized that I had no idea of how she had gotten to her grandmother's the day before. I guess I was still a little wired after our argument and I was freaked out that she may have hitchhiked again. She told me you promised I would be there and she was so happy that I was."

Sara shrugged. "I hate to break promises to children." There was a sad, wistful tone in her voice, and she rubbed her thumb across the back of her hand, in an absent, comforting gesture. "You should have to grow up to before you become used to disappointment."

Catherine covered Sara's hands with one of her own. "Thanks," she said, gauging Sara's response carefully, wondering if she should ask about the memories that caused such a deep sadness in Sara's eyes. Sara glanced left and saw what Catherine was thinking and quickly forestalled her. "Is that the time?" she asked, indicating Catherine's watch. "I need to change or I'll be late for work."

"Wanna carpool in?"

"No, you should go. No reason for both of us to be late."

Catherine frowned but agreed. "Ok. I'll see you at work, then." She waved from the doorway as she opened the apartment door and Sara headed to her bedroom, mentally trying to figure out what she was going to wear. "Yeah, I'll see you in a few."


	24. Chapter 24

AN: I'm worried that people aren't reading this anymore, and I'm a bit burned-out on the characters, so I am considering putting this story on hiatus to work on a couple of new stories. I do have several more chapters/story arcs planned, but I think I need to take a break for a month or two. I will come back to this fic, and I do have a couple of fun, short C/S stories I want to develop in the meantime.

**xxx**

It was a hectic shift that night, with everyone spinning off in all different directions working solo on a venerable blizzard of criminal activity in Vegas that night. Sara hadn't seen Catherine for hours, and when she got to the locker room two hours after the end of shift, she thought that she might have missed her. Sara took in the empty room and sighed; she wanted to apologize for her sudden bout of moodiness the night before, but it looked like she wouldn't have the chance. Leaning over to untie a stubborn boot lace, she caught the words before the door behind her opened. "Sara's been out in the field most of the night," Warrick's voice sounded concerned and Sara automatically knew who he was talking to, "Have you had a chance to talk to her since, um…" He stopped in the doorway when he saw Sara on the bench, and quickly backed out, "I just remembered I have some results waiting in DNA."

Catherine stood just inside the door, looking everywhere except at Sara. "Gil wanted to see us this morning before we left." Narrowing her eyes, Sara took in Catherine's demeanor, the slightly slumped shoulders, the way she studiously avoided meeting Sara's eyes, and frowned in vexation.

"Ok, give me a minute. I want to change my shirt," Sara replied, unbuttoning her shirt until she felt Catherine's eyes on her. She smirked as she deliberately caught Catherine's gaze. "I thought that might get your attention. Hey," she said, becoming more serious, "I know the guys have been giving you some grief about what happened, but remember what we talked about before shift. Remember that we're ok and that's all that matters, ok?"

Catherine sighed and sank down on the bench. "I know, it's just…"

Sara reached out and rubbed her shoulder through the silk fabric of her blouse, "Yeah, I know. But just focus on me and let what the guys say slide off, ok?"

"Focus on you, huh?" Catherine muttered as she leaned forward, pressing a quick, soft kiss on Sara's stomach, chuckling as Sara drew a sharp breath, pulling her stomach muscles in so that the skin she was kissing retreated from Catherine's lips. "Not difficult when you are standing around, half-dressed." Sara swiped her head playfully, a smile promising more twisting her lips, before turning to change her shirt.

**xxx**

The bright morning sun blinded Sara as she stepped out of the lab, causing her to curse as she slid her sunglasses down to block out the sun. Sometimes, she missed the clouds and wind of the California coast so much it caused an ache of longing deep in her stomach. Standing there in the harsh sun that made every surface seem sharper and harder, no blurred edges or softness anywhere, Sara wished she could rewind the clock a few days so that this latest complication hadn't happened as stress tightened her back muscles. Rotating her head on her shoulders, she scanned the parking lot, seeing Catherine's car still in the lot. She had stopped by the DNA lab after their meeting with Grissom, when he requested a few minutes alone with the older CSI.

"Hey." Startled, she spun around to face the woman whose weary voice had called to her.

"Hey yourself. Everything ok?" she asked, apprehensively.

"Yeah," Catherine said, nodding, looking weary but relieved. She caught Sara's worried look and reassured her. "It really is. He just wanted to make sure that everything was ok at home."

"Ok." Sara accepted the explanation, thinking there was more, but glad Catherine felt relieved. It had been a stressful couple of days for the blonde, she was sure, and she turned back to the desolate landscape under the sharp sun, exhaling audibly.

Catherine stepped up behind her, so her shoulder discretely rubbed against Sara's shoulder blades. "Breakfast? My place? One hour?' she asked, a quiet mummer, as private as their touching.

"Your place? Are you sure?"

"I'm sure. I'll make pancakes."

Sara eased her body back a little, leaning imperceptibly into Catherine and feeling a little electric spark leap between their bodies. "Sounds good."

**xxx**

The bright sun was muted inside by light drapes that moved with a slight breeze, but it still warmed the room and cast everything with a golden glow, especially Catherine's already-golden hair. Sara sat on a stool, watching as Catherine made pancakes. Sara enjoyed the chance to get in some unabashed staring; Catherine had changed from her work clothes into a pair of yoga pants and a light blue tank, pulling her hair back into a simple ponytail, a casual, relaxed look Sara found more sexy on her than most of her other outfits. When she reached up to take down the maple syrup, her tank rode up, showing a broad swath of skin at her back, and Sara spent a long moment imagining her lips pressed to the small of Catherine's back and her hands elsewhere. Catherine was obvious to her scrutiny, so when she turned away from the stove a few minutes later, Sara's wide smile surprised her. "What?" she asked, puzzled, as she carried the dishes to the table.

Sara laughed, shook her head and joined Catherine at the table, carrying over both coffee cups. "No, seriously, what?"

"I love that outfit."

"This?"

"Yeah, that."

Catherine's eyebrow shot up and she gave Sara a disbelieving look, but she didn't question. Sara pursed her lips, a half-smile lighting her eyes, before she started on her breakfast, only glancing up when she felt Catherine's eyes on her. She glanced self-consciously around her and wiped her mouth, afraid she had food on her chin. "What?"

"I know so little about you." Catherine's expression and tone were pensive, and it was obvious to Sara that the incident at work was still on her mind. "You have to know a lot about me, because my past is pretty much public knowledge, but I don't know much about you."

Sara leaned back in her chair and toyed with her coffee cup, finding a spot of sunlight like a cat and turning her face to the sun. She seemed relaxed, but she didn't meet Catherine's eyes. "Like what?"

"Like why you went to Harvard instead of Stanford or Berkley. Why you studied physics as an undergrad. When and how you met Grissom. Why you decided to move here on a moment's notice when he asked. Why you never take a vacation and visit your family."

"I don't have any family," Sara answered quickly, a little too quickly, staring out the plate glass window of Catherine's sliding patio doors. "I… don't talk about it. As for Harvard, I wanted a change from California and Boston seemed as far as I could get without leaving the country. I got into Berkley, but it was too close to home. Too many people from my area were going to college there." Her eyebrows slanted over her eyes as she tried to reconstruct the thoughts of a young, 17-year old girl. "I like science and I was really good with computers, calculations, and math in high school, so physics seemed the best fit. And I moved here because Grissom asked, I had just broken up with Lucy, and it's the number two lab in the country. I guess you could say I was ready for a change."

"Do you always run away from your problems?" Catherine teased, but the sudden stillness of Sara's hands on her coffee cup and the way her eyes darted around the room told Catherine she had struck a chord.

"Maybe," Sara answered after a long pause. Shaking off the quiet and stillness, she smiled and picked up her fork. "But the past is the past, right?"

**xxx**

They had retired to the couch to catch the news, Catherine leaning back against the pillows, and Sara curled up against her stomach, her hands caressing the skin exposed by Catherine's waistband and Catherine's fingers toying with Sara's riot of curls. After only a few minutes, the movement of Sara's hands stopped, and Catherine laughed silently when she realized that Sara was fast asleep. _Well, there went my post-breakfast plans_. Her smile faded as she contemplated the relaxed features, the eyelids closed against the swirls of emotion in those brown depths. _The closer I get, the further away I feel_, she thought. _She like one of those maps of the world in the middle ages: vague contours of the countries drawn—badly—with large swathes of land simply blank, bearing the legend, Here be dragons_. Her pessimistic thoughts surprised her, as did the knowledge that she had badly misjudged Sara. _Once, I thought I knew all there was to know about Sara, and it all boiled down to her job and Grissom. _Seeing more of this map she was charting in her head, Catherine realized that she had had two tiny puzzle pieces laid on a vast canvas, and that she didn't even know where the rest of the pieces were, much less how to fit them together.

Musing on the thoughts running through her head, Catherine absent-mindedly kissed the top of Sara's hair and then was surprised by a rumble of laughter. "Mmm, sorry I fell asleep on you," Sara muttered, her eyes still closed.

"You aren't awake now."

"Yeah," Sara purred, nuzzling her head against Catherine's stomach, pressing a soft kiss below the navel. Her head settled back down and her expression relaxed into sleep once more. Teetering on the edge of sleep, Catherine wasn't sure Sara even realized what she was saying when she mumbled, "I love you."

_What about your lips?  
Underneath my fingertips  
In a dark room  
Touch is true  
What about my fingertips?  
They were carving out your eyelids  
I'm drawing a map of you  
_Susan Voelz


	25. Chapter 25

AN: Sorry it's been a long, long while. The dissertation has been taking up a lot of my writing energy and this last season of CSI has really made me disenchanted with the character of Catherine, so it's been harder to write this ship lately. Plus I'm breaking in a new fandom, so I've been writing on another story. But I'm beginning to feel this story again and I should be able to complete it sometime soon.

**xxx**

The next couple of weeks passed without incident at work, as they tried to fit into a routine at work and at home, keeping the lines between the two spheres of their lives separate. They managed, most of the time, although a few incidents marred their perfect track record. When Catherine had reached out to clean an oil smear from Sara's cheek, she let her fingers linger on the soft skin, tracing down Sara's neck until Nick's voice in the hallway caused them to jump apart hurriedly. Sara had hidden her blush by disappearing under the car, and Catherine's overactive imagination filled in the visual of joining Sara on the creeper so that when Nick came into the room, he gave Catherine an odd look. Later that morning, Catherine shared the image, leading to a long session on Sara's couch and the subsequent prohibition of working with Sara in the garage. She violated said prohibition two nights later but made sure to lock the door so that no one would be able to see four jumpsuit-covered legs entwined on the floor of the garage.

The guys continued to bet in the Sara-dating pool and watch her like a hawk for any indication of who she might be seeing, especially after news of her turning down overtime hit the halls, but the speculation and interest had finally died down a little, as she gave no clue as to who she was dating. Greg continued to be the most interested, but luckily he was in the lab most of the time and so didn't see her as much as her other co-workers. Catherine didn't contribute much to the speculation, but did put down a twenty on Vartann.

Sara seemed unaware of her sleepy confession and Catherine didn't bring it up; for once in her life, she was unsure as to how to broach a topic, especially when she wasn't sure of her own feelings toward the younger CSI. Nothing had prepared her for falling for a co-worker, much less the younger, female co-worker who she had fought epic battles with on a regular basis, and even now, after a month of dating, just hearing Sara's voice in hallway made her breath hitch or seeing her unexpectedly when she stepped into the break room made her knees weak, it had been so long that Catherine had felt this kind of freefall of emotions in a relationship, she didn't know how to label it.

**xxx**

"No way, Sara."

"But…"

"But nothing. I'm not letting you in there to interview this guy." Catherine swung around so that she stopped them both dead in the hallway of the police station, grabbing Sara's arm to pull her into the soundproof observation room. "Do I have to point out that we have this guy for raping and killing four tall, thin, pretty brunettes who bear a striking resemblance to you? And that he tried to get close to you during the arrest? He's already fixed on you and I'm not going to give him any more opportunities to get close. Ok?"

Sara stared at her in silence for a few moments, a calm before the evitable storm of words Catherine surmised would begin at any minute, but Sara surprised her yet again. "You remember the Julie Waters' case?" she began, the seeming non-sequitor confusing Catherine, as did the quiet, controlled tone of her voice. "You told me that you decided to exploit the situation with Delhomme when he had the same fixation on you," Sara's hand cut Catherine off just when she was about to speak, "AND you told me when I'm in your shoes, I'd do the same thing." She shrugged, in her deliberately bland way that hid a grin. "You were right."

A door opening in the interview room drew Catherine's gaze to the subject of their conversation, a thin, bookish looking man with sandy hair falling over cheap, black-framed glasses. From the moment Catherine had looked into the dead, pale blue eyes of this rapist and murderer, a chill had lodged in the base of her spine and her stomach had turned. There had been no soul behind those eyes. She rarely had reactions to their suspects, and never to this degree, so when a look of sick happiness washed over his face as he looked from her to Sara, she had slid to her left to stand between them. Now, even though the orange prison jumpsuit seemed to diminish the man and turn his pallor a sickly yellow, when he turned his head to stare directly into the mirror, like he knew they were there, Catherine suppressed an urge to step back from the glass. She wanted nothing more than to keep this evil _creature_ away from Sara. Working against her own inclinations and the trickle of fear that she couldn't quite squelch, Catherine nodded. "Ok." Sara's reflection in the glass answered her nod a second before the door clicked shut.

A few moments later, Sara and Brass walked into the interview room together, and their suspect, George Stubben, immediately perked up at the sight of Sara. Jim asked him a couple of questions, but he never looked away from Sara.

"Are you sure you don't want a lawyer present?" Brass suggested, making sure that their air-tight case wouldn't be tossed on a technicality.

"No, I'm caught. No lawyer is going to undo that."

"So, George, we have you on one count of rape and murder in the first degree, and we have you linked to three other open cases." Jim shook his head sadly. "What, a good-looking guy like you couldn't get a date?"

George took his eyes off of Sara for just a second to glare at Brass contemptuously. "No."

"No, you couldn't get…"

He swung back to stare directly into Sara's eyes, his watery gaze trying to penetrate the ebony depths of Sara's. "Not three… six." He smiled as Sara and Brass exchanged a surprised look

"Six?" Sara repeated, trying to prompt him to supply more information.

"Yes."

"Who?"

He shook his head. "I never knew their names…" Smirking at Sara's suspicious expression, his eyes slipped down to linger on Sara's hands, her chest, her neck, before fixing back on her smoldering eyes, "just their bodies."

"Where?"

He seemed to not hear her. "A name isn't intimate, now is it, Ms. Sidle? Or should I call you Sara?" A shrug, leaning back in his chair like he was explaining the secrets of the universe over coffee at a bistro. "It doesn't really matter. What matters is that look of fear in your eyes, so strong I can almost taste it. Pain would look exquisite on you."

Sara broke eye contact, looking down at her note pad, her fingers wrapped around her pen so tightly they ached. "Where are the bodies?"

"I won't tell you. I'll _show_ you. We can take the good detective with us." Another smirk at another exchanged glance. "That's the deal: the three of us, alone, and I'll take you to all the bodies."


	26. Chapter 26

AN: Another delay as vacation kept me away from the Internet and I've been working on another fic, a crossover fic with Sara and Olivia Benson of L&O:SVU, which should be going up on the Passion and Perfection archive soon.

**xxx**

Catherine found herself repeating the same argument she had lost just an hour before, but now with more vehemence. "You are not going, traipsing around the desert with this guy." Sara tried to interrupt, but Catherine steamrolled through her attempt., her eyes flashing as tried to stare Sara down. "I don't care what he promised you. He could be taking you to incontrovertible proof that Bigfoot exists for all I care. YOU are NOT going."

Fuming, Sara fired back. "Catherine, this isn't about me. We have two responsibilities in this job: to find the bad guy and give peace to the victims and their families. There may be three more families out there that we don't know about who are waiting to find out what happened to their loved ones. You are not going to keep me from doing my job!"

"But what if he's just making those other three victims up to lure you out there?"

"That's a risk I'm willing to take."

"I'm not," Catherine snapped.

"Too bad."

Stung, Catherine stared into the blazing depths of Sara's eyes. _How many times have we gone around and around this particular point? The content of the arguments changes, but it's always the two of us, staring, glaring, and not backing down a centimeter. _Catherine circled around to a question that plagued her when she felt vulnerable and scared about their relationship: _How can we be good to each other if all we have between us is passion and anger? And where does all her anger come from? Will she ever let down those walls and let me see who she really is, what made her the way she is? _Catherine broke eye contact first, unable and unwilling to keep up the battle of wills that they were engaged in, but not before seeing a look of triumph cross Sara's face at her seeming acquiesce.

Grissom stepped into the interview room then, and put himself between the two women staring each other down. "This entire argument may be unnecessary. Brass is asking for the Sheriff's approval on this operation right now. Until we have that, there's no reason to fight. But I want to go on the record to say that I think it's a bad idea for you to go, Sara. There's no reason to risk yourself for people who are already dead. We have other means at our disposal."

"That could take months if not years. Those families deserve to know the truth now. And if we find the bodies, we have him on all counts."

Catherine couldn't take it any more; Sara's arguments, while all good and fine about the job, were missing the point entirely. She stepped around Grissom, almost shoving him into the table. "He's up to something, Sara, can't you see that? He wants you, specifically, out there, alone with him for a reason." _And damn it, I'm scared for you. Can't you see that too?_

"Brass will be there."

"That isn't reassuring. What if he has an accomplice? Or has set some kind of trap? You'd both be walking right into it."

Catherine could see Sara's mind running over the possibilities, giving some credence to her argument, but then Brass re-entered the interview room, saying, "The Sheriff gave the go-ahead," and Catherine knew that there wasn't a chance in hell that Sara would turn back now. Instead, she looked to the chain of command, knowing Sara would kill her in private later, but it was better than Sara being hurt by that monster. She turned to Gil, "That's insane! You _can't_ let her go."

The glare from Sara told her that what waited her at home was not going to be pleasant. "The Sheriff has approved the operation. I'm going," she said, steel in her voice.

Grissom grimaced, but shrugged his shoulders helplessly.

Brass interjected, trying to bring some semblance of civility to the argument. "Look, we're taking precautions. We're going to be wired and monitored from a mobile command station with a GPS tracker the entire time we're out. SWAT is mobilized and will be following at a safe distance." For a long moment, he gazed at Sara, and then spoke directly to her. "We're going in hot, which means that weapons will be free the entire time. Any wrong move from this guy and we take him down, no hesitation. Do you think you can handle that? Because if you can't, then the deal is off."

Catherine held her breath for a long moment as Sara frowned and glanced down, but then she met Brass's gaze firmly and nodded. "I can handle it."

"Ok."

Waving a hand at her black pantsuit and cream-colored silk top, Sara said, "I'm going to go get my windbreaker and hat from my truck."

"And I'll dial up the comm guys and get them here. We'll leave in about thirty minutes in my car."

Sara walked out of the station, hearing Catherine's footsteps behind her. She slipped out of her jacket, tugged on her windbreaker, and tucked her hair back underneath her hat, all the while silently ignoring the other woman. It wasn't until she locked the truck and faced the shorter woman that she spoke. "Catherine, you are not going to talk me out of this. You did the same thing with Delhomme."

"This is different."

"How?"

"Because…" Catherine sighed, searching the station parking lot to see if anyone was within hearing distance. "This isn't the time or the place… but…" In the streetlamps, Sara's eyes were shadowed under the brim of her hat, so Catherine had no way to see how her next words would be received, but she said them anyway, "I love you." She let the words hang there in the space between them, wishing she could see Sara's face, her reaction, something, anything. Catherine was surprised to feel how right, how true, it felt to say, but still Sara was standing in front of her, unmoving. Catherine hurried on, to try to blunt the surprise of her words. "That's why it's different. I love you and I don't want to lose you for something so, trivial, so avoidable. I can't… lose you." The last was said with a hitch in her voice, as Catherine realized yet another truth about her feelings for Sara. _God help me, I'm in this for the long haul and I've never been so scared in my life. _

Wrapped up in her own thoughts, Catherine missed how Sara's defiant stance slowly crumbled as she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around the smaller woman and pulled her into a tight hug. "I love you too." Catherine felt the tears burning her eyes as she snuggled into Sara's warmth, not caring who might see as she sought reassurance and comfort. "But this is the job and we can't let our relationship interfere with our work. I can't let you interfere with this. It's too important."

"I have a bad feeling about this," Catherine confessed, feeling like a child admitting to being afraid of monsters under the bed. The difference was that Catherine knew real-live monsters did exist, and the man Sara was going out with was one of them.

"I know." Sara tighten her hold on the woman in her arms before pulling back to meet Catherine's eyes. "But I still have to go." Catherine finally saw Sara's eyes, saw the mixture of courage and fear lurking there, and she swallowed past the lump in her throat to nod and mutter, "Ok."

Sara caressed her cheek softly, catching tears Catherine hadn't realized she had shed, before pressing a quick kiss against her forehead. "We'll talk more after work, ok?"

Catherine drew back, and then glanced around the parking lot, amazed that nobody had come out of the station or driven up to see them, and even more amazed that Sara had hugged and kissed her right here in front of the police department. She let Sara lead her back into the building, schooling her face into a mask of professionalism as they made their way in. Catherine stopped right in front of Brass. "I'm riding along with the mobile command station." Brass's expression was openly speculative about what had happened out in the parking lot, but he kept his mouth shut and just nodded.

"Me too," Grissom chimed in.

"Ok, fine," he said blandly before grinning at Sara with a devil-may-care gleam in his eyes. "Ready? Let's go get mic'ed up."

**xxx**

Mercifully, the ride out to the desert had been quiet, as their suspect had requested a country music station and had hummed along with the songs the entire trip, leaving Sara alone with her thoughts. Not surprisingly, all she had thought about was that bombshell conversation they had had in the police department parking lot. Sara had known, on some level, that Catherine cared deeply for her, but the fear in her voice and the desperate way she had clung to Sara told Sara, far beyond her words, how deeply her feelings ran. '_I can't lose you' _reverberated through Sara's head, the quiet intensity of Catherine's words going far deeper than her declaration of love. It had puzzled Sara from the start that the usually confident and composed Catherine was so insecure about Sara's feelings for her. _Ok, so I'm not really vocal about my feelings, but I don't think I've given her reason to doubt that I care for her. That I care for her a lot. Why doesn't she trust that, trust me? She's been running scared since day one, with so little reason. She's the one who could have any man or woman she wants._ Sara's line of thought was cut short by Brass announcing that they had arrived at the location Stubben had given them.

The wind whipping around the valley as Sara stepped out of the sedan made her thankful she had had the forethought to grab her baseball cap. Dawn was just breaking over the cliffs to their east, and the long angle of the rays were blinding. She hastily slid her sunglasses down over her eyes, rotating her head to ease the stiffness out of her shoulders before she slid her weapon free of her holster. Brass caught her movement and did his own surveillance of the area before opening the back door to the sedan.

He quietly instructed the prisoner to walk in front of them at all times and to lead them directly to the area. "If I even think that you are leading us in a circle or delaying just to stay out of your cell, we'll be out of here so fast you'll think it was all a dream. Understood?"

As Stubben mumbled 'understood,' under his breath, he locked eyes with Sara, giving her the slightest hint of a smile, which caused her stomach to take a slow roll.

"So where are they?"

Back at the mobile command post, Catherine cursed the designer, who put plenty of electronics and communications equipment but gave her no room to pace as they listened.

"The bodies are about a mile out along a hiking trail."

"A mile? You carried them for a mile?" Brass's voice was patently disbelieving, even through the comm line.

"They were tall and skinny and easy to carry, like Ms. Sidle over there. She can't weight more than 110 lbs, right, sweetheart?"

Sara's voice held a tightly controlled anger, but she was ignoring his attempts to provoke her. "Which way?"

"Over here."

A few moments of shuffling feet and wind came over the comms, and then, "Did you notice the resemblance, Ms. Sidle? How much you look like all of them? Or maybe they look like you? It's so hard to tell where they end and you begin."

"Keep walking," Brass cautioned.

"Are you afraid of me, Ms. Sidle?"

"No."

"The other one, the blonde one, she was. She knew she was looking at pure evil. What do you think?"

"I've seen pure evil," Sara replied, the certainty in her voice sending a chill down Catherine's back, "and you're not even close." The contempt in her voice came through the speaker loud and clear. "You're just a garden-variety psychopath and we deal with your type every day in this job."

"Garden-variety?" Stubben's voice went up an octave, almost squeaking in his disbelief, before he got his anger under control and he chuckled. "Ah, Ms. Sidle, you are taunting me, but just you wait." The promise in his voice made Catherine's stomach constrict and for a second she thought she was going to lose her lunch. _Please don't let me be right about this_, she prayed silently as she never in her life wished to be wrong more than she did right now.

"Hey! What are you doing?" Brass's voice cut through the command post like a lightening bolt, everyone tensing to the alarm in his tone.

Back in the desert, Stubben had dropped to his knees at a trailhead and was scrabbling around in the dirt with his cuffed hands. "I marked my path with these buried pieces of turquoise so I could always find my way back," he explained, digging the blue rock out dirt. "I _had_ to find my way back. I didn't want any of my girls to get lonely." He looked up at the two gun barrels pointing at him before indicating the trail with a nod of his head. "It's this way."

When he had dropped down to his knees, Sara had swung her gun up and braced it with her free hand, just like she had been taught at the firing range, her heart beating painfully in her chest as her fingers gripped the handle so tightly her fingers were numb after a few seconds. She finally sucked in a breath when Stubben had hoisted the turquoise, feeling the moment of hyper-awareness and near panic pass. She watched as Brass pulled Stubben roughly to his feet and they started along the trail he had indicated, with Sara following after a moment, a few steps behind. This trail was narrow and Brass and Sara walked back-to-back, both keeping their weapons down and out, on edge after the scare.

He had stopped trying to carry on a conversation and instead focused on the ground at his feet, dropping down twice more to dig into the dirt. Sara, however, had noticed a difference, as he wasn't paying attention to his hands as he dug but instead was scoping out the terrain surreptitiously, and the piece of turquoise in his hands looked remarkably similar to the first one. Brass didn't seem to notice and Sara sighed, wishing she had a private comm line to him to warn him that their prisoner was up to something. Instead, she increased her own vigilance as the time wore on and they made their way further out into the desert, the tension building in her stomach and shoulders with every step.

Stubben finally broke the silence as they reached the bottom of a low crest, where the trail split at campsite into three different paths, the site level and wide enough for Jim to move several steps to his left to cover Stubben, his weapon poised but pointed down to the sand. "Almost there, I think," Stubben muttered as he dropped to his knees yet again, pawing through the dirt, his eyes intently searching the ground where his fingers scraped into the loose sand and rocks. Sara felt the gun in her hand raise in response to the mounting tension, her finger tightening on the trigger as Stubben's head snapped up to fix on Jim.

Back in the mobile command post, Sara's shout of "Gun!" broke the stillness of the listeners a second before several shots rang out.


	27. Chapter 27

After the shocked silence, Catherine fell heavily back onto the bench behind her, her rubbery legs unable to hold her up, while Grissom took over and ordered the driver to head to the coordinates on the GPS unit. Jim's voice just barely carried over the motor roaring to life. "This is Brass, we need back up and a bus at our position." There was a pause and Catherine's heart plunged to the floor upon hearing the call for an ambulance.

"Suspect is down, I repeat, suspect is down. Two officers on scene are unharmed," Brass continued and Catherine remembered how to breathe again, taking each breath as if it were her first, still grateful for the bench holding her up. From the mic pick-up, Catherine could hear Jim ask, "Are you ok?" and Sara's seemingly distracted reply, "Yeah, yeah, I'm fine." Another faint voice, tight with pain, spoke over the loudspeaker, so low that Catherine had to strain to hear:

"You were going to be my masterpiece, my crowing achievement. I would have stopped after you, because how could I have topped taking and killing the policewoman who had me in custody? No better statement, no more perfect moment, than when your fellow cops found your dead body waiting for them and me gone. _I_ would have been a _legend!_"

"Sorry we spoiled your plans, then," Jim commented, as the sirens in the distance grew louder. "Instead of a legend, I guess you'll have to settle for being a run-of-the-mill psychopath."

The roar of motorbikes and people shouting spoiled the reception then, and Catherine didn't hear anything else. Instead, she leaned her head back and closed her eyes, trying to figure out which deity she might pick to pray to. When their van pulled up beside Brass's car a few minutes later, she stumbled out on still nerveless legs, following Grissom up the path, now well marked with tire treads and foot prints. After about five minutes, they passed several emergency personel and police manhandling a stretcher out with the unconscious body of Stubben. Grissom's hand tightened on Catherine's arm, holding her in place as they carried him past, and afterwards she wasn't sure if Grissom's restraint had been for her or for him.

At the actual crime scene, Sara, pale, too pale in the golden light of the early morning sun, was staring down at the blood pooling the ground at her feet like she had never seen blood before. In her relief at seeing Sara unharmed, Catherine fought the urge to wrap her arms around the taller woman and never let go, a thought that was as comforting as it was realistic. Instead, she reached out and stroked Sara's arm lightly, hoping to convey her concern in touch and voice. "You ok?"

"Yeah, I'm fine," Sara head stayed bowed, staring at the ground, her words sounding like she was reading a line that she had been told to repeat regardless of the question or circumstance.

"I'll need your gun, Jim," Grissom said. The emotion in Brass's eyes was unreadable as he handed over his weapon and glanced at the tall brunette standing just a few paces away.

Grissom frowned as he checked the load and then he looked back to Brass. "I'll need the weapon that was used in the shooting," he said with exasperation. The click as Sara unsnapped her holster and handed over her gun to Grissom caused every eye to fix on her. "Sara?" Grissom's voice contained a note of disbelief as he accepted the gun from her.

She shrugged, a careless gesture contradicting the tight way she held herself. "I saw the gun first. I shot him."

"Two tight bursts of three in the arm, shoulder, and chest," Brass explained, pride and curiosity coloring his voice, "extremely precise shooting."

Another shrug. "I qualify every year."

"That kind of precision doesn't come from a once-a-year weapons proficiency and you know it."

"I go to the range every once in a while to practice." She could feel the frowns and confused looks directed at her back. "It's ok, I just," she sighed, "I don't want to accidentally kill someone if I have to fire my weapon. So I practice." The ghost of a conversation echoed in Catherine's head, from long ago, and Sara's voice saying _I could never take a life_. She just wished Sara would look up, look at her; the way Sara's eyes were fixed on the ground frightened her and she wished there was some way to get the reassurance she needed.

Any further conversation was cut short by Brass's cell. "IAB wants us to come in and give our statements on the officer-involved shooting," he explained, reaching out to lead Sara back to his car. Brass nodded at one of the paths. "Stubben was leading us up that way. That might be the place to start looking."

As they left, Catherine squinted into the morning sun, feeling the heat of the day already begin to build "You should handle the shooting," she said, hoping Grissom wouldn't ask why she was recusing herself, "and I'll continue with the Stubben case, since it was our case to begin with."

Warrick and Nick walked up then, and Catherine filled them in and sent them up the path. A few minutes later, Warrick called to her. "Catherine! I think you need to see this." It had been years since Catherine had felt nauseous at a crime scene, but when she saw what Warrick was pointing to, she felt the bile rise in her throat.

**xxx **

Sara fidgeted in the interview room, looking for what seemed like the fiftieth time at her watch. She had been escorted to this room and told to wait; she had seen the uniformed officer posted at the door around the hallways a few times, and he had politely offered to get her coffee or water, but mercifully hadn't tried to engage in small talk. Sipping her tea, now long cold, Sara mused on the experience of being a perp. _If they are making me wait to make me nervous, well, mission accomplished_, she fretted, glancing at the two-way glass. _Is someone in there, watching me, judging my responses, seeing if I'll crack?_ She tried to remember how many times she had stood on the other side of that exact glass, planning an interview, while the suspect stewed. _Stop it, Sara,_ she chastised herself,_ this is just routine, standard procedure after an officer-involved shooting. You did nothing wrong_. Frowning into the glass, her reflection a striking contrast of pale skin and ebony hair, she recalled a play she had seen in Boston based on Bertram's idea of the panoptican, where the sign inscribed with the saying "God Sees You" was the threat that the prisoners had responded with the most diligence. Not imprisonment, not torture, but surveillance as the control method of choice. The criminal, the insane, the revolutionary, all becoming one under the system of the surveillance. _I wonder which one am I?_

Her dark train of thought was interrupted as the door to the interview opened and three plain-clothes officers entered, two sitting across from her and one beside her. "Captain Brass insisted that the union representative be present for your interview, even though we'll just be asking standard questions." As the video camera started, Sara thought, _Showtime_, and almost giggled at the irrelevant path her thoughts seemed to be taking her.

The two IAB officers, named Carter and Jenkins, let her tell her statement uninterrupted before asking her questions. "Ms. Sidle, you expended six rounds when you shot the suspect. You know the protocol is to fire until your weapon is empty if you or the life of another officer is in immediate danger."

"Yes."

"So why didn't you follow protocol?"

"The suspect was down and he didn't have his weapon. There was no need to continue firing."

"Your first round struck his arm and you didn't fire into his chest until about the third hit. Why is that?"

"I was watching his hands. I must have been aiming at the same place I had my eyes trained." She frowned at the rookie mistake, even though she, as a CSI, wasn't expected to know any better. "When I saw the gun, I just started shooting."

"You said you saw the gun first. Why do you think an experienced officer like Captain Brass wasn't paying as close attention as you were?"

"He was. I had a better angle to see the suspect's hands as he brought them up from the ground."

Carter frowned and wrote a quick note. "Captain Brass reported that he was taken by surprise."

"We both were. But I thought something was off when the suspect stopped to dig in the ground so I may have been hyperaware of the suspect's actions."

"The tape shows that the suspect claimed to have planned on raping and killing you." Sara closed her eyes a second, replaying those words in her head, the mental images swirling, and she felt a familiar queasiness. "Do you believe he planned on making good on his threat had he managed to subdue you?"

Sara opened her eyes and stared at the man sitting across from her, feeling angry for the first time during the interview. "I don't know. He's a psychopath and he raped and murdered four women that we know of. But I can't predict what might have happened."

"Were you aware that the forensics team found a blanket, handcuffs, condoms, and a knife just over the rise on that trail?" Her stomach rolled over and she swallowed hard, and just shook her head wordlessly. Carter went on, "They have found at least four other bodies, lined up one beside the other, directly below that blanket. They are still searching for more. What do you think about that?"

"That I'm glad I didn't get to be number eight!" Sara snapped. She looked around the room, suddenly feeling very claustrophobic. "Are we done here?"

Carter glanced at his partner before nodding. "I think we have everything we need. We'll contact you within 48 hours about the outcome of our investigation. Until then, you are on paid leave." With that, they got up and left, followed by the union rep who had paused to give Sara his business card. A moment later, Sara followed them out the door, just barely making it across the hall in time.

Brass had been pacing the hallway outside of Sara's interview for over an hour when he saw the IAB officers leave. Just as he was heading in, Sara darted down the hall and into the women's rest room. Jim followed, not giving the action a second thought as he pushed open the door. The sound of retching led him to Sara, bent over the toilet, and he caught her dark hair up and rubbed her back while she emptied her stomach. When she finally raised her head, leaning back against the stall partition, resting her head in her hands, he asked, "You heard about…?"

"Yeah."

He examined her gaunt face and haunted eyes, knowing she was going over the 'what ifs' in her head. "Sara, you got the bastard. You didn't become one of his victims." Sara didn't answer, didn't meet his eyes, keeping them tightly closed. "Come on," Brass said, straightening and extending his hand, "I don't know about you, but I'm sick of the police station. Let's get you home." He knew just how upset she was when she allowed him drive her home with minimal fuss, so when she invited him up for a drink, admitting that she didn't want to be alone, he accepted the invitation immediately.

One Scotch had turned into several as he told her about the times he had been involved in a shooting, about the guilt when a civilian had gotten killed during one of those times, and about the coping methods he had used in the aftermath. The conversation had turned to other things, finally, to fine Scotch, to audio equipment and to classic, black-and-white movies, discovering they both had a passion for noir. The hours passed and Sara didn't notice that she hadn't turned her cell phone ringer back on after the interview.

**xxx**

Catherine tossed her cell phone down into the passenger seat with a snarl of frustration when she heard Sara's voice mail greeting for the tenth time. After countless hours working the scene in the desert and finding six bodies buried out there, day shift had taken over the search of the surrounding hills and she, Warrick, and Nick were finally able to leave. She had been trying Sara's cell every twenty minutes since the moment she had hopped into the SUV with Nick, and then every five minutes since Grissom had called her into his office to show her the tail end of Sara's IAB interview, the sick expression on Sara's face not concealed by the glare she had directed at the questioner. Catherine hadn't even had to ask; Grissom had ordered her to go check in on Sara and to take the rest of the night off, and for once, Catherine was thankful for his inability to deal with people.

Pulling into the parking lot of Sara's apartment complex, Catherine didn't see Sara's car. The nerves she had been running on all day finally shot and a thousand different worst-case scenarios running through her head, Catherine took the stairs two-at-a-time before pounding on Sara's door. The door opened onto Sara's strained but smiling face, and Catherine enveloped the taller woman in a hug, her mouth searching for Sara's soft lips, only to have Sara avoid her kiss and try to pull away.

"Cath, uh, Jim is here."

It took Catherine a second to understand, and then she released Sara hurriedly. "Oh." She tried to apologize with her eyes as she straightened, looking over Sara's shoulder to Brass sitting on her couch. "Hi Jim," she said, waving, before turning back to Sara. "I came to check in on you. We've been trying to contact you but your cell phone's turned off."

"Oh," Sara walked over to the counter and picked it up, and then grinned, laughing to herself. "I forgot to turn the ringer back on after my interview. Sorry." Catherine stared at her, perplexed. "Jim and I were just having a drink," Sara motioned to the half-empty bottle of Scotch, sloshing a little of her drink on the counter. "Want to join us?"

"Are you drunk, Sara?" Catherine questioned, suddenly putting the pieces together and glaring at Brass. He had settled back into the cushions of the couch, raising a highball of amber liquid to his lips.

"Maybe. Why?" Even drunk, Sara recognized Catherine's look of anger. "What? Is something wrong, Catherine?" When Catherine didn't answer, Sara continued, "Look, I had a shitty day and I'm _unwinding." _Sara took a couple steps closer to the shorter woman, seeing a look of disappointment in her eyes, but she was too wrapped up in herself to care. "You can either join us or you can leave."

"I, I need to go pick up Lindsey," Catherine stammered.

"Fine." Sara plopped down on the couch beside Brass, throwing a companionable arm over his shoulders as she picked up a line of conversation they had obviously been on before Catherine had arrived. "So what do you think of the 500 series? Worth the extra money or not?" As Brass answered, comparing one line of cars to another, Catherine tried to suppress the flash of jealousy she felt, seeing Sara draped over Jim's shoulders, talking to him instead of her, and let herself out.


	28. Chapter 28

28.

The sound of the doorbell penetrated Sara's consciousness, setting off a sympathetic throbbing in her head. She silently willed the person into a deep black hole, even though she had a pretty good idea of who it was, as she rolled over to try to get back asleep. _Big mistake_, she told herself as the sunlight coming through the shades hit her eyes, burning a path from her retinas straight to her muddled brain. Grabbing a pillow, she covered her head and face and tried to ignore the buzzing, the throbbing, and the spinning.

Ten minutes later, she threw the pillow across the room in disgust and squinted at the clock, realizing she had only been asleep for four hours. The person at the doorbell was now alternating between two short and one long on the doorbell and was obviously not going away. Rolling off the bed, Sara unbalanced as soon as her feet hit the floor and the room took a slow, lopsided spin and she sunk back to the mattress, her hands shaking and her stomach queasy.

_Not fair. I can't be hung over and still drunk at the same time_, she reasoned, so she tried opening her eyes again and watched the room go around again. _Somebody, kill me now._ Then the events of the day before played against her eyelids like a 'this is your life' movie and the irony hit her. _Oh yeah, that's how I got into this mess in the first place._ The doorbell was now buzzing out SOS in Morse code, and she vowed to break the thing with her bare hands. _Once I'm able to stand, that is._

Trying again, she felt a bit more stable, able to stumble the three steps to the opposite wall, using it to hold her up as she slid to the bathroom. Toothpaste, mouthwash, and a glass of water later, Sara felt vaguely alive and almost up to trying to make it across the living room. Once that heroic feat was accomplished, she decided to skip the victory dance and instead stumbled the last few steps to the door. Foregoing the obligatory glance through the peephole, since there was only one person she could imagine being this stubborn and annoying, she swung open the door and glared at the person on the stoop.

"Catherine."

"It took you long enough. I've been out here for over half an hour." Catherine pushed past her into the hallway, not waiting to be invited in.

"You could have left," Sara said, bluntly, wishing the blonde had taken that option instead of deciding to have this confrontation right now, when she was barely able to stand, much less deal with an emotional Catherine. "In fact, Catherine, it'd probably be better if you did."

"What?" Catherine's shout cut like a razorblade through Sara's head, and she winced. "You want me to _leave_? Like you wanted me to leave last night?" Sara saw the hurt painted in stark relief across Catherine's face, and it almost penetrated the throbbing fuzziness that was Sara's brain.

In a softer tone, Sara tried to appease the visibly shaking woman in front of her, "Now is not the time to have a conversation, Catherine. Please."

"Hung over?" Catherine asked, satisfaction and anger edging into her voice. Sara squinted open her eyes to see Catherine's smirk, and felt her own anger rise is response. After all, it's never been said that Sara Sidle couldn't give as good as she got.

"Not. Drunk. Enough."

Catherine spun around to hide her expression from Sara, but not quick enough to keep Sara from seeing her barb hit. _God, what is wrong with me? I'm acting like a child._ She started to reach out when the edge of anger and fear that had been driving Sara for the last 24 hours resurfaced. _Wait, when did this become about Catherine and her feelings? I seem to recall I'm the one who had to shoot a guy who wanted to rape and murder me._

Catherine had spun back to face her, fury replacing the hurt in a classic Willows' move: lash out instead of taking the pain in, putting it all on the people around her instead of dealing with it herself. Still, her words stung. "Do you have a drinking problem?"

The juvenile "I drink, I fall down, no problem" flashed through Sara's head as a first response, and for a second, those irrelevant giggles from the previous day returned. Catherine was staring at her, wide-eyed and furious, and Sara thought for a second that the words had slipped out.

"Do you think this is funny?" When Sara didn't immediately respond, Catherine asked again, "I asked you if you have a drinking problem."

"No, Catherine, I don't," Sara shot back. "I had a few drinks. That's it." Suddenly Sara's own rage came bubbling up, pouring into her words. "I'm not your kid, Catherine, I don't need you to take care of me, ok? I'm not Lindsey, you are not my mother, and you don't get to tell me what to do." Sara's voice had risen during her outburst, and Catherine took a step back, surprised. "Not at work and especially not in my own house. I drink, yes. I drank last night because I _had_ to shut my mind off, for just a few hours. I suggested you leave last night because I couldn't look at the disappointment in your eyes because I desperately needed _not to feel_ _and you weren't helping_. Got it?" A stunned silence descended on the apartment as Sara finished, and she banged her head against the wall at her back, adding to the throbbing behind her eyes.

After a long minute, Catherine finally spoke, choosing her words carefully. "You're right. I'm not your mother and I can't control you. But I am your lover, and…"

"Prove it," came a throaty growl from Sara.

"What? Prove whaaa…. unh." Catherine's words trailed off in a gasp as Sara caught her up, pushing her back against the wall, her tongue sliding between Catherine's lips as their bodies crashed together. Caught off guard and off-balance, Catherine could only cling to Sara as she was overwhelmed by Sara's sudden onslaught. Sara pressed her advantage, forcing Catherine's head back so she could deepen the kiss, her hands on Catherine's hips digging in to bring their bodies even closer.

Catherine could taste the minty flavor of Sara's toothpaste and the faintest tinge of Scotch, could feel the harsh plaster at her back where her shirt was already hiked up, and could hear herself moan as Sara's insistent hands stroked and caressed her overheated skin. Sara broke the kiss, whipping Catherine's shirt and bra off, and the much-needed oxygen returned some ability to process to Catherine's brain.

"Sara," she whispered as Sara nibbled and bit her way down Catherine's neck, her hands finding Catherine's breasts, squeezing and twisting, "Sara, please…."

"Please what?" Sara whispered into Catherine's ear, feeling the shorter woman shiver in her arms.

"Please stop."

"You really don't want me to do that," Sara muttered against her neck, licking the sensitive spot just above Catherine's collarbone as she teased Catherine's nipples with her thumbs, eliciting another throaty moan. Her mouth dipped lower and Catherine arched to meet her lips. Sara's hands slid over Catherine's hips and down her thighs before sliding under her skirt and cupping her ass.

Catherine tried one last time. "Sara… we need to talk."

Sara pulled her mouth back from Catherine's breasts, teasing, taunting, the sensitive flesh with her breath, lightly blowing and watching the quivers in her lover's stomach in response. "Talk later. Fuck now."

"Is that… what we're doing?" Catherine gasped out as her body played traitor, craving Sara's touch. She squirmed under Sara's fingers and mouth, begging to be touched more deeply, more thoroughly.

"You want to call me doing you against a wall making love?" Sara teased Catherine's nipple with the lightest of feather kisses, watching as Catherine's body strained to sustain contact, watching as Catherine caught her bottom lip between her teeth. Catherine flushed as Sara's words, so dirty and immature, so out of character for her tender and sensitive lover, embarrassed and exhilarated her, all at the same time. "Come on, Cath" Sara continued, almost conversationally except for the deep, husky timbre of her voice, "Four-inch heels… a skirt… a thong? You honestly expect me to believe you came here for conversation?"

"I… " Unable to take any more teasing, Catherine wrapped her arms around Sara's waist, pulling her up and in for a smoldering kiss, pressing her body as tightly against Sara's as she could, and still finding too much space. If she could have dissolved her body into Sara's, sliding through her like osmosis, Catherine wasn't sure if she would have been satisfied. She could feel Sara's smirk against her lips, but she just parted them under the pressure, inviting Sara to enter, her fingers raking the tender skin of Sara's back, marking her with long, deep scratches, as Sara's fingers caressed her stomach on their way to her breasts.

Dizzy from the lack of oxygen and from Sara's expert hands, Catherine pulled back from the kiss, forcing Sara's mouth to relocate to her ear, Sara's fingers tangling in her golden hair to hold her head still, her tongue and breath alternating between wetting the sensitive passage and blowing it dry, driving her crazy with want, until Catherine grabbed a handful of hair and pulled Sara's head back, whispering "Do me_ now_" through clenched teeth.

Catherine's fingers clutching Sara's shoulder under her hand, desperately trying to convey her need. "Sara, please," she begged. Wrapping one arm around Catherine's waist to hold her steady, Sara parted Catherine's lips with her fingers, eliciting a gasp from her lover. Catherine wanted to scream but she couldn't find the breath; she could hear her own voice muttering "Oh god, please, yes, please, Sara, god," like a mantra, pleading for the satisfaction that Sara promised with every touch, every movement of her tongue.

Just as Catherine felt her legs begin to shake with her impending orgasm, Sara slowed the tempo, pulling Catherine back from the edge while Catherine pleaded and begged her for release, her hand finding its way into the auburn hair to pull Sara's mouth to her. Catherine's pleading was wordless now, just a long moan punctuated by gasps and yelps as Sara drove Catherine over the edge. Catherine screamed then, her body thrashing and shaking as wave after wave washed over her.

When she was able to breathe again, Catherine was thankful for Sara's strong arms holding her up as she unclamped her cramping hand from the coat rack, wiping at the tears in her eyes. Sliding up her body, Sara caught her and cradled her, suddenly, unexpectedly, tender and soothing. Catherine reveled in the feeling of safety and security that washed over her as she was cocooned by Sara's body.

Wrapped up in Sara felt like home, she realized, like this was the place she could rest and lay down her burdens, and the anxiety of the previous two days suddenly made sense. _I couldn't touch her, I haven't really touched her for the last two days. I just needed to put my arms around her and breathe her in. _Catherine nuzzled into Sara's neck, pressing soft kisses there, feeling utterly spent but knowing, more than anything, that she wanted to touch and taste every inch of Sara's body.

She heard and felt Sara's laugh rumble through her chest as Catherine's kisses got more insistent, her teeth fastening on the soft skin and biting down hard. "Are you sure you don't want to talk now?" Sara asked. Ignoring her teasing, Catherine caught her chin and kissed her way up to Sara;s mouth, tasting Sara's toothpaste and herself on Sara's lips.

Sara's lips parted, allowing entrance, but Catherine didn't take her up on the invitation, instead feathering kisses along her cheekbones and over her eyelids. Her fingers traced the places where she had raked Sara's smooth back, liking the idea that Sara was carrying her marks. She wanted to imprint her touch on Sara's body, tattoo herself onto every inch of skin, and Catherine was shocked by her possessiveness. She wanted to erase the memory of every past lover and make it so that only her touch remained, forever and ever.

Pulling back, Catherine stared into Sara's ebony eyes, clouded with desire, raw with want, and she reached out, stroking Sara's face gently while she brought Sara's hand to her mouth, kissing and licking the palm, sucking her fingers, nibbling the pulse at her wrist, all the while keeping her eyes locked on Sara's. Sliding Sara's boxers down her legs and her own skirt off as they moved, Catherine backed Sara up and bent her back over the kitchen counter.

Catherine leaned against the long muscular body and brushed her nipples against Sara's, loving the fact that her heels gave her the height advantage for once. Bracing herself against the counter and dipping her mouth down, Catherine gave Sara a slow, deep, open-mouthed kiss that went on forever, her tongue exploring every inch of Sara's mouth and Sara let her dominate with no resistance. She parted Sara's thighs, sliding her own between them to press against the wetness at Sara's center, and heard Sara whimper deep in her throat in response. Seeing Sara's glazed expression when she raised her head, Catherine smirked, rubbing her thigh against the sensitive skin while Sara's stomach contracted and she bit back a moan.

Sara's hands wrapped around Catherine's waist to try to pull her closer, but Catherine caught them, forcing them back to the kitchen counter. "Keep them there," she growled in Sara's ear, catching the earlobe between her teeth, "And keep your eyes closed." Catherine watched as Sara's eyelids obediently fluttered closed. Sara's immediate and unquestioning acquiesce unleashed a wild passion inside of Catherine and she bared her teeth in a feral smile as she attacked the already bruised flesh of Sara's shoulder with her mouth. She continued her assault down Sara's chest, leaving a trail of bites down to her breasts.

Sucking Sara's nipple into her mouth, she teased the taut flesh with quick, forceful strokes, feeling Sara's body quiver under her with each flick of her tongue. Catherine raised her head and gazed up at Sara's face, with her closed eyes and clenched teeth, appearing preternaturally quiet and calm, standing as still as a statue. Catherine nibbled her way back up Sara's neck, leaving a trail of kisses instead of bites this time. She stopped, poised above the trembling body of her lover, and watched as Sara braced herself on shaky arms and waited. Catherine let her weight sink into Sara, trusting in Sara's strength to hold them both up, as she began to slowly grind into her body, hip to hip, breast to breast, mouth to mouth. Her hands curled around Sara's ass and crushed their bodies together, eliciting a soft gasp from Sara, as Catherine kept up her slow grind.

Sara's head had fallen back, her eyes still closed, obviously concentrating on every movement Catherine made. Her hands free, Catherine let them roam, leaving marks everywhere they wandered, scratches along the sensitive skin of Sara's back, bruises on her thighs. Her hands roamed, pausing only for moments, never long enough if Sara's gasps were any indication. Smiling into the kiss, Catherine teased Sara's taunt body, stretched tight and trembling with every touch, every sensation. Leaving Sara's mouth, Catherine began a painfully slow journey down Sara's body, tasting and nibbling every inch of flesh as she made her way across Sara's stomach and down her thighs.

Sara's body was a study in tension; every muscle stretched taut to the absolute breaking point as Catherine played Sara's body like a musical instrument, every kiss, every lick, and every slightest touch setting off a resonant tremble rippling through Sara's body, her stomach twitching with every caress. Catherine had never seen her so quiet yet so focused in her passion, and it drove her to tease and touch Sara everywhere but where she most needed it. Sara, to her credit, didn't plead or beg, but instead let Catherine play her body until each stroke elicited a gasp of pain and need from her. Finally, Sara convulsed, her entire body collapsing as all the tension in her body let go, and all her breath left her body in a rush.

Catherine caught Sara as she collapsed onto the counter, arms and body giving way suddenly, completely spent. Pulling Sara into a hug, Catherine pressed soft kisses into Sara's neck, feeling Sara drape her body over her shoulders.

Finally, Catherine managed to maneuver them into the bedroom, kicking her shoes off somewhere along the way, her eyes closing the instant her head hit the pillow.

_I can't sleep_

_When I'm not next to you_

_I cry_

_This is love_

_This is how I love you_

-Me'shell Ndegeochello, Love Song #1

**xxx**

AN: I edited this to make it suitable for The unedited version can be found on the CatherineSara Yahoo group and will eventually be archived on Passion and Perfection.


	29. Chapter 29

AN: Hmm, I poured a lot of time and effort into getting that last chapter exactly right and I got a single word as a review? I admit I'm not sure what to make of that. Long chapter and finally 'the talk.'

_And who am I for Christ's sake anyway  
To judge your life this way  
When my own's in disarray  
So it's not for me to say  
Cuz I change my mind from day to day  
And when I look at you  
I only see bits of myself anyway  
So go on  
Stop listening to me  
Don't ask me how I feel_  
-Everything but the Girl, Two Star

**xxx**

When Catherine woke, they were entangled on the bed, so entwined that Catherine had a hard time telling where Sara's body ended and hers began. She pushed up, staring at the alabaster skin of her lover, still a bit shocked at how the morning had turned out. She had expected an argument or a stormy silence or the experience of being kicked out of the door of Sara's apartment, but wild and uncontrolled sex in Sara's hallway and kitchen hadn't been on the agenda. In fact, she had expected to have that part of their relationship on hold as they dealt with the aftermath of the yelling and screaming Catherine had anticipated that morning. Catherine was even more amazed at the lethargy that pulled her back down into the warmth of Sara's embrace, unable to resist just a few more minutes snuggled against her lover before they had to face the day.

When she awoke again, Catherine felt Sara's hands smoothing her hair back and her moan of pleasure rumbled from her chest. "Mmmmmm." She experimentally tried to raise her head, collapsing back into the comfort of Sara with a happy sigh. "I can't move. I think I'll stay here forever."

Sara chuckled at that. "What do you think Grissom would say when we both tendered our resignations, citing an inability to leave my bed as grounds?"

"That I'm a lucky, lucky woman," Catherine muttered, imagining the look on her friend's face. She grinned at the image in her head and pressed a kiss to Sara's collarbone, thinking about how lucky she really was.

"Hmmph," Sara replied.

"Sara?" Catherine snuck a peek at the pensive expression on Sara's face as she stared at the ceiling, still absently stroking Catherine's hair. Catherine reached up to caress Sara's cheek, concerned. "What's wrong, honey?"

Sara refused to meet Catherine's eyes. "I'm sorry about… this morning. I was… out of control."

"Mmmmm… yeah," Catherine purred in agreement. When Sara didn't reply, she glanced up again, seeing the far away look in Sara's eyes. "I'm not complaining. Far from it, in fact."

Sara's eyes were almost black, clouded by her unsettled emotions. "That wasn't…" Catherine's fingers on her lips cut her off.

"Sara, Sara, honey, look at me," she commanded, meeting the stormy eyes when Sara glanced down, her mouth curled in contempt, for herself, not for Catherine. "Sara, this morning was fine. Hell, it was more than fine. It was amazing…."

"Yeah, less than twenty-four hours after you tell me you love me, I'm fucking you in the hallway." Again, Sara's deliberately crass language made Catherine's mouth go dry and caused a throbbing in the pit of her stomach. She knew Sara was hoping to elicit disgust or repulsion, but Catherine found herself anything but disgusted and she had to restrain herself from sliding up Sara's body to show her just how turned on she was.

Instead, Catherine smiled at the memory of their antics of the morning and gave a self-satisfied sigh. "Yeah," she said, a dreamy note in her voice. Sara shifted under her uncomfortably, and Catherine cut off the stream of self-condemnation and disgust she knew was coming. "Sara… I liked that, I like you, wild, out of control like that. Not… not all the time, of course, but sometimes…. Although if you get into the habit of making me wait like that I may have to kill you for teasing me." Once again Catherine relived the morning and she felt her body heating.

Sara chuckled for a second before continuing more seriously, "Are you sure? I, it scared me, a little. I don't…" she paused, searching for the word, but not finding a good one, "like being out of control."

"It didn't scare me. I know you wouldn't hurt me…" Catherine's mouth stretched into a wide grin, "except in ways that I want you to." Her voice was more serious as she continued, "I trust you, hon."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. And besides," Catherine stroked the pale skin of Sara's chest, fingering the red bite marks there, "I don't think you are the one who should be apologizing for being too rough."

"I'm fine," Sara replied, brushing off Catherine's concern with a shake of her head.

"Are you?" Catherine questioned carefully, watching Sara's face as she pressed. Sara shook her head, resolutely. Catherine thought it was odd that, given the fact Catherine had slapped her, that Sara was concerned that she might hurt Catherine, but not the other way around. Shaking off the misgivings in her head, Catherine regulated the morning's activities to old business and decided to begin the conversation they really had to have. "How are you feeling about what happened yesterday?" she asked, keeping the subject vague so Sara could interpret and address any of the events surrounding the Stubben case.

"I, I'm fine," Sara's pensive sigh filled the room, speaking volumes about how not fine she really was. "It was just a stressful day."

"Yeah," Catherine agreed, reliving the fear and anxiety for a moment before speaking again. "I was so terrified, and so helpless, sitting there. I thought… I'm sorry." Sara raised her head to give Catherine a puzzled glance. "I shouldn't have made such a fuss about you doing your job. I mean, you're right. You're not my child and I have no right to try to protect you from your own choices. And just so you know, it's not because I didn't think you could handle yourself. I just don't trust everyone else. But I should have just trusted you." Lapsing into silence, Catherine stroked the smooth skin of Sara's stomach, listening to Sara's heart beat, slow and steady, under her ear.

"Thanks." Sara's dark eyes had that faraway look Catherine was beginning to recognize, the one that signaled that Sara was mulling over some past that Catherine wasn't a part of, and Catherine's heart sank as her fears about ever knowing the past of the woman she desperately wanted to love with all of her being surfaced.

This time, Catherine's sigh filled the room, drawing Sara's attention back to her. "What?" Sara asked softly, rubbing Catherine's back as Catherine snuggled against her neck, suddenly needing the physical closeness to reassure her that Sara was still there.

"I love you." Even to her own ears, the words rang hollow, empty, like she was trying to convince herself rather than voicing a surety, and Sara picked up the tone immediately.

"It sounds like you mean to add a but to that sentence," Sara asked carefully, as if she were afraid to ask, afraid to know the answer.

"But sometimes I don't know if I even know you, know who you are. I get so scared, because how can I love someone I don't know?" Catherine felt the tears starting as she voiced a fear that had held her heart for days, maybe even weeks. _How can I love someone I don't know, care so much when I know so little?_

Sara's eyes closed and her arms snaked around Catherine to give her a tight hug, squeezing their bodies together. "I'm no good at talking about myself. I never got into the habit. I…" There was an almost painful silence as Sara searched for the words, "…never had anyone to listen."

"Never?"

"Never." The certainty in Sara's voice was frightening, that tone that she got in her voice that told Catherine she was remembering a past hurt and a deep pain. Whatever it was, it had shaped Sara so fundamentally that it was a part of her truths, those things that made her who she was today, and it was a part of her she couldn't seem to share. Even with Catherine wrapped around her body, so close there was no space between them, Sara still sounded so alone, so solitary, that Catherine tightened her hold on the slim body beneath hers.

"What about friends? Sta? Your ex? What about your parents?"

"I learned at a very early age that I only had myself. I learned not to rely on anyone else."

"You didn't feel like you relied on your parents?" Catherine asked, incredulously.

"Growing up, my parents, um, my parents were ex-hippies, not exactly reliable. They made promises, but… then they'd forget." The remembered pain in Sara's voice was unlike any Catherine had heard before and it spoke of a little girl who had spent too much time wishing for things she had realized at an early age that she was never going to have. "Little stuff, big stuff… it all slipped through the cracks. But you know when you are a kid, everything's big, everything's important. The promises to go get ice cream or a new book. The permission slip that never got signed. Every year was _the_ year that we'd actually go to the zoo. After a while and after I got old enough to mow grass for neighbors or pull weeds, I just bought the books I wanted or forged my mother's name to be able to go on that class trip to the museum."

Sara had stopped talking, caught up in her memories, and Catherine wondered how her parents had been that inattentive. "Was it drugs?"

"No, no, by then, it was just alcohol. They ran a bed-and-breakfast, kinda rundown and cheap, and most of the clientele was bikers and hippies, and they'd sit out with the guests on the porch for hours drinking and talking. The guests would smoke sometimes, but my parents didn't."

Just as Catherine was going to ask another question, Sara clearly concluded any more discussion of her family with a curt, "I learned to be self-sufficient early and I never did break the habit."

"Even with friends or girlfriends?"

A heartbreakingly sad expression graced Sara's features as she contemplated the question. "I don't trust easily." And again the silence stretched.

Finally, Catherine asked the question that she had been dying to ask since the conversation began, "What about me?"

Sara drew in a deep breath and exhaled with a sigh. "I don't know," she answered truthfully, and although her words caused another sliver of fear to worm its way into Catherine's heart, at least she knew where she stood. "I, this thing with us, it's so new. It's… amazing, unexpected, but it's so new." Sara's fingers began to trace circles on Catherine's back, a soothing gesture that seemed to work for both of them. "It'll take time."

There was a long pause before she spoke again. "I love you," Sara breathed softly into Catherine's hair, sounding almost like a confession rather than a declaration of love. "No buts, no reservations, just love." The words warmed Catherine, and the quiet surety in Sara's tone told her that this, too, was one of Sara's truths, and she clung to that. "Trust is different than love, and for me, it takes longer." Catherine nodded her understanding, afraid to look up and meet Sara's eyes, afraid that her uncertainty would show, feeling both chilled and warmed, reassured and denied at the same time.

"You wanted to know about yesterday?" Sara asked, surprising Catherine, who had thought that the conversation was over. "What do you want to know?"

Catherine thought for a few moments, thinking about all the questions that had swirled around her head. "I saw the tape of your interview with IAB and I know you know about what he" Catherine couldn't bring herself to name the monster, "was planning. I almost threw up at the crime scene when Warrick showed me that." She paused for a second, gathering her thoughts.." I'm not sure what the question is, I just want to know what you are thinking about that and if you really are ok."

"I threw up. I ran out of that interrogation room and puked my guts out as soon as they left." Sara's admission seemed wrenched from her almost painfully, as if she hated to admit to any weakness. "Jim found me. That's why he drove me home."

Catherine flashed back to Sara and Jim, drunk and chummy on the couch, and she sighed before admitting to her insecurity. "I was jealous. I saw you with him and it hurt that you could talk to him and not me. God, from the moment I saw you in the desert, all I wanted to do was be your strength and confidante. Then I walk in and Jim was here instead of me…." Her voice trailed off and she rubbed her face against Sara's stomach, pressing a kiss there.

Sara shook her head. "No, not really. I invited Jim up because I didn't want to be alone, but also because with him, I really didn't have to talk. He… and the alcohol… were good distractions. Jim told war stories about his experiences for a little while and then we talked about movies and cars for the rest of the night. He didn't ask questions and he didn't expect me to open up about my feelings. And I needed that last night."

"And that's why I had to leave?" Catherine questioned quietly, knowing a sliver of hurt colored her tone.

"I," Sara pressed a kiss into the golden tresses of Catherine's hair before continuing, "I didn't know how to tell what I needed," she confessed quietly, "I didn't know how to say that I needed to be distracted, that I couldn't handle your questions or your fear or your need for reassurance. I haven't had to explain myself to anyone or ask for space when all I've had is space for years." Catherine nodded in understanding against her stomach, seeing how different their lives have been. She, with her daughter, her family, and her friends all around, didn't have much time for quiet contemplation or strategic withdraw; for Catherine it was hit every problem, confront every issue, head-on and immediately because she didn't have any time before the next problem presented itself. Sara, obviously, dealt with problems differently, and her next words confirmed this, "Sometimes, I'll need to retreat when I'm working through something; I'll need time and space, but next time I'll articulate that need more clearly."

Pushing herself up so her light eyes could search the depths of Sara's dark ones, Catherine asked, "Promise?"

Sara nodded solemnly. "Promise." After a few moments, Catherine broke the gaze as she slid up Sara's body to kiss her softly. She watched as a brief smile slid from Sara's face, her eyes focusing on the walls. Stroking Sara's cheek gently, Catherine drew Sara's eyes back to her, "What?"

"I was scared." Sara's eyes slid away again. "I knew he was going to try something, just like you did. I, I think I almost shot my own foot when he dropped down to dig in the sand that first time. My hand was shaking so hard." She shook her head like she was disappointed in herself. "I don't know which was worse, the idea that maybe I could shoot him or that maybe I couldn't. It's one of these questions you really don't want to have answered about yourself, what's your capacity to harm another person?" Her eyes narrowed, like she was holding in tears, and Sara bit her lower lip in an effort to control them. "Then I saw the gun and there was no hesitation. I just started shooting. I, I don't remember stopping…" Her voice cracked on that and the next words seemed almost painful for her to speak aloud. "I wanted him dead and I almost killed him."

Catherine knew Sara had serious issues with the idea of hurting others, but she was surprised to see the anguish in her lover's face as she recounted the experience of shooting Stubben. She hadn't expected that that would be the issue Sara agonized over. "He deserves to die," Catherine stated flatly, her own anger at the man who had wanted to hurt the woman in her arms flaring to life yet again in the pit of her stomach.

"Maybe. But he doesn't deserve to die by my hand. It's not my place to be his executioner." Her choked voice belayed the rational, almost clinical words she spoke and Sara's eyes closed tightly.

"You didn't kill him," Catherine reassured her.

"I still wanted him dead." Finally, the tears began to fall and Sara buried her face in her hand for a second before Catherine gathered the lanky frame into her arms, cradling her in her arms tightly, while the sobs racked her body. When Sara finally quieted, she sat up, wiping at her face, embarrassed. "Thanks," she whispered, trying to convey more than a simple thanks for holding her while she cried, hoping the word would convey the enormity of what she was feeling.

Catherine's soft, knowing smile as she pushed Sara's hair back behind her ears and caught a few stray tears conveyed her understanding without words, and she wondered if Sara would think she was crazy if she thanked her in turn. Sara's quiet admission and moment of weakness, signifying a crack in the walls Sara used to keep everyone else out, was infinitely precious to Catherine, bespeaking a level of trust that Catherine wasn't sure Sara even knew she had given yet.

They cuddled on the bed for what seemed like hours, each giving and receiving of strength and reassurance from the other, until Sara's cell phone rang and she hurried out to take the call. When she came back in, her wide smile warmed her face, but it didn't quite reach her eyes. "That was Brass. He said the IAB board cleared me in the shooting and I can go back to work tonight. He's, uh, coming by in about an hour to pick up his car. He took a cab home last night."

"Well, I should head out then," Catherine said, stretching to her fullest extension as she got out of bed, the soreness of her limbs making her want to crawl back into the bed.

"You don't have to," Sara frowned, her eyes troubled as she gazed at her lover, naked in the middle of her bedroom. She knew they weren't ready to tell people about their relationship, they hadn't even talked about the possibility yet, but Sara hated feeling like they were hiding or sneaking around. Catherine read the expression and leaned in to give Sara a long kiss, wishing they had the time and energy for a repeat performance, before breaking off, leaving Sara breathless. "I know I don't have to for Jim's sake. But I do have to pick up Lindsey and I promised her I would take her shopping this afternoon." She then sauntered toward the bathroom, giving Sara ample opportunity to watch before turning with a seductive smile, "Join me?"

After Catherine left, Jim came by, offering Sara dinner and a drive to work to celebrate the IAB's decision, and since she was up and ready, Sara agreed. They spent a couple of comfortable hours at a steak and seafood place off the Strip, comfortable except for the fact that Jim's eyes kept being drawn away from Sara's face to her neck.

Unable to take it any longer, Sara finally just snapped, "what?" and Jim gave her a look that was half-guilty and half-sheepish. He squirmed uncomfortably for a few moments before telling her, "You, uh, have a…" he flicked at a spot on his own neck, "on your neck."

"A…" Sara began before her eyes went wide as she realized exactly what she had on her neck, and she flushed crimson as she realized the night of hell in store for her at the lab. _I'm going to kill her._


	30. Chapter 30

Catherine was walking down the hallway toward the break room when a strong hand caught her arm and pulled her into the locker room. Recognizing the scent of her lover's shampoo, the same scent in her hair tonight, Catherine immediately tangled her hands in the dark strands and pulled Sara in for an open-mouthed kiss. They had only been apart for a few hours, but Catherine had been hard pressed to keep up with the steady stream of chatter from Lindsey and one loud whiny "MOM!" in the food court had pulled her away from a particularly vivid memory of Sara's trembling stomach and pleading moans the day before. Now, with the object of her desire in front of her, she didn't waste any time.

"Catherine!" Sara whispered, trying to untangle their bodies. "That's not why I pulled you in here."

"It's not?" Catherine's hands slid down Sara's neck and along her sides, tickling as she did so. "That's too bad," she purred in Sara's ear, "because I was thinking…."

"Catherine," Sara warned, finally breaking completely away from the shorter woman and putting the bench between them. Catherine could feel her mouth curving into a predatory grin as she took in the flush that stained Sara's cheeks and ears, the annoyed glare, and the way she struggled to control her breathing. "Did you notice?"

The seeming nonsequitor caused Catherine to pause in her climb over the bench for a second, but only for a second, as she advanced on the taller woman. "Notice what?" she asked distractedly as she tried to close the distance between them.

"This!" The outrage in Sara's voice was clear as she swept her hair back, exposing the large bruise marring her pale skin.

Catherine pushed Sara back against the lockers and pulled her head back to inspect her handiwork. "This?" she repeated as she stroked the red skin. "I like it," she smirked. "It's just too bad the rest are hidden…" Sara's eyes widened as Catherine catalogued the damage she had done the day before, "The bites on your shoulders and breasts, the scratches and heel print on your back, the bruises on your hips and thighs…"

"Catherine," Sara growled warningly as she tried to pull away again, but Catherine's body had her trapped against the lockers, her fingers burning a path up and down her sides.

"This… lets the lovestruck boys know that you are taken," she whispered, "that you are taken often and well." Catherine ran her tongue over the bruised skin lightly. "Your body belongs to me. I like that they know it."

"Actually, I think my body belongs to me," Sara replied cheekily. Catherine's reply was a long, deep, wet kiss that left Sara dazed and breathless. Surveying her handiwork once more, Catherine smiled her predatory smile and watched as Sara's eyes darkened with desire.

"You are mine," Catherine told her, "so anything that belongs to you belongs to me." She ran her hands down Sara's body, brushing over her nipples, along the curves of her hipbones, and down her thighs. "Including this." With that, Catherine turned and walked out, leaving Sara to stare after her on trembling legs.

Still dazed, Sara wandered into the break room a few moments later and poured a cup of coffee, hoping the caffeine would help her mind to function again. Sipping the hot liquid carefully, she turned, staring off into space, not even noticing that everyone was sitting around the table, chatting about the news while waiting for Grissom.

A voice penetrated the fog. "Sara? Earth to Sara?" Nick was calling, and apparently had been calling for a while. His voice had a concerned note, and she suddenly realized that this was the first time since the incident with Stubben that the guys had seen her. It all seemed so long ago now.

"Oh, hey Nick. Hey guys." Sara said brightly, a fake smile plastered on her face as she hung her head down, hoping her hair would hide the mark. She shot a look at Catherine, whose twinkling eyes and tight smirk showed her obvious enjoyment of Sara's discomfort.

"Sara, hey, where were you?" Nick's voice was a tone deeper and his accent more pronounced as he stepped closer, his worry obvious on his face. "You were like a thousand miles away just now." Nick stepped even closer when Sara didn't meet his eye. "You sure you're ok?" A pace away from the counter, he stopped dead, his eyes widening, mouth hanging open, staring at Sara's neck.

"Nick?" Greg called from the table, "now what's wrong with you?" He looked from where Nick was frozen in place to the spot on Sara's neck where Nick's eyes were fixated and then aped Nick's expression perfectly. Unfortunately, he recovered his ability to speak much quicker than Nick. "So the mystery man is a biter, huh? God, that's so juvenile. Even _I_ haven't had a hickey since I was like 15."

Nick had retreated back to the table and dropped into his seat with a thud where he and Warrick exchanged a disturbed look before fixing back on Sara as if asking for an explanation. With one last, 'don't you dare laugh' glare at Catherine, Sara announced, "I have work," and left the break room.

Later, right at the end of shift, she caught up with Catherine in the locker room again. She trapped Catherine in the narrow space between the bench and the lockers, her thigh parting Catherine's expertly to apply subtle pressure while her hands mussed Catherine's hair. "Do you know what you started?" Sara asked, irritation clear in her voice, although not her actions. "It's no longer 'Sara's mystery guy,' it's 'Mr. Lovebite'."

Catherine tried to stifle her smile, given her lover's apparent anger, but it was near impossible. The guys had been merciless, from what Catherine had seen, and Sara had walked through the lab all night with a scowl, daring anyone to say anything to her that wasn't work related. Catherine had reveled in it, not simply because she had been in on the secret, but because Sara had been adorable in her anger. Sara's voice dropped to a low intense whisper. "I'm glad you are enjoying this, but don't worry, I _will_ get you back."

"But if you give me one, the guys will get suspicious," Catherine reasoned as Sara's mouth lowered toward her ear, teasing her with breath and tongue.

"Who said anything about giving you a hickey?" Sara asked as she ran her hands up under Catherine's shirt, cupping her breasts, her thumbs lazily circling the nipples. The sharp inhalation of breath turned into a moan; Catherine's breathing was suddenly labored and her eyes glazed. Taking Catherine's head thrown back and parted lips as invitation, Sara gave her a deep, hungry kiss that turned Catherine's legs to jelly. "I have something else planned for you…" Sara explained, stepping back to appraise her lover's smudged lipstick, messed hair, and dazed expression. She grinned and turned to the mirror to check her lipstick just as the door burst open and Nick, Warrick, and Greg exploded into the locker room, laughing and joking. Catherine's synapses, still misfiring after that blazing kiss, wouldn't carry any commands to the rest of her body, so she just stood there, braced against the wall of lockers, as the guys walked back to them. Sara's tight, satisfied smile in the reflection in the mirror told Catherine she had known the guys were right behind her.

"Hey, Cath, you ok?" Greg asked.

His voice seemed to break the thrall Catherine was in, and she managed to push herself off the locker, running a hand through her hair to try to tame the messed curls. "Um, yeah, yeah, I'm fine," she said, turning to her locker so she didn't have to see Sara's triumphant smirk while she tried to get her raging hormones under control.

"Hey guys, what do you say to breakfast?" Sara chimed in then, "My treat." The guys gave her surprised looks all around, given her mood for most of shift, and Catherine tried to hide her consternation, knowing that Sara was subtly baiting a trap for her. "One catch though," Sara cautioned with raised eyebrows, "no mention of my love life or the um…"

"_Cough_hickey_cough_," Greg supplied, then backed away from Sara as he caught her narrowed eyes. "What, I had to clear my throat." His innocent look lasted all of a second before he relented, shrugging his shoulders in 'what can I do, that's just me' gesture. "Ok, deal," Greg said, and Nick and Warrick chimed in as well. "Sounds good to me." "I'm starved."

Lockers slammed shut and the rustle of jackets and bags being grabbed filled the locker room, while Catherine stood rooted in front of her locker, trying to decide if she wanted to join them or not. Her girlfriend's pleased expression made her distinctly nervous and she knew there was more to breakfast than breakfast. But then, as the gang all gathered by the door, Warrick called to her, "Catherine, are you coming?"

"Yeah, Catherine, are you coming?" Sara asked innocently, her eyes dancing with mirth.

**xxx**

Catherine squirmed in her seat again as Sara's fingers trailed down her inner thigh while Greg and Nick tried to convince Warrick that the new Xbox coming out was going to be the best one yet. Sara had been subtle in her torture all morning, but Catherine was near the breaking point and when she glanced over at those amused hazel eyes, she knew Sara knew it too. Instead of pulling her in for a heated kiss or ripping her clothes off right there in the middle of the restaurant like she wanted to, Catherine simply stilled Sara's hand on her leg and asked to be let out of the booth.

As Catherine made her retreat on shaky legs, Greg looked up from their conversation and frowned. "Catherine's pretty spacey this morning. Is she ok?"

"I'll… just go check on her," Sara reassured him as she slid out of the booth and followed her girlfriend to the back of the restaurant. She only got a foot in the bathroom before Catherine grabbed her jacket and hauled her into a rough embrace and a bruising kiss.

"What took you so long?" Catherine growled as her arms snaked around Sara's waist and cupped her ass, grinding their bodies together as she did so. "God, Sara," she gasped as Sara nibbled on her collarbone, "you're killing me."

"I know," Sara's honeyed tones perfectly conveyed her pleasure at the situation.

"Please, baby," Catherine begged, trying to get Sara's hands to where she needed them, "please."

"No."

"No?"

Sara's throaty laughter rumbled in her ear. "I told you I would get you back. I'm afraid you are going to have to wait."

"Wait?" _Oh, god, no. She can't be serious_. But one look into Sara's eyes and Catherine knew she was. Her head thudded back into the wall behind her. "How long?"

"Hmm, that's a good question. Maybe I should make you wait til all the teasing stops about the hickey." Sara pretended to mull that option over while Catherine stared at her, open-mouthed. "I'm going to endure days of teasing about this, you know." Catherine nodded her head in agreement. "So I think the least you can do is endure oh," checking her watch "say 23, 24 hours."

Feeling the liquid heat raging through her body, Catherine doubted she could last 24 seconds, much less 24 hours. "Maybe I'll relieve the pressure myself," Catherine challenged.

"Yeah, you could…" Sara devoured Catherine's body with her eyes hungrily, like she was breakfast and smirked at the flush painting Catherine's cheeks, "but it wouldn't be anywhere _near_ as good. And I'd know… and then you'd have a longer wait."

"You wouldn't." Sara simply smirked, and then lowered her head to toy with Catherine's earlobe, licking the sensitive flesh, "I'll call you later, baby," she whispered as she left. And when Catherine had composed herself to go back to the table, the guys told her Sara had to run and said she'd see her later.

**xxx**

Catherine rolled over and tried to find a halfway comfortable position on the bed once more, punching the pillow under her head in utter frustration. Incredibly vivid dreams had woken her after just an hour after falling asleep and now, the afterimages of the dreams flashed through her mind every time she closed her eyes. Or images of Sara, in her Forensics jumpsuit, in that navy peacoat, naked in the shower… With a groan, Catherine sat up and brushed her hair back out of her eyes and surveyed her bedroom with a critical eye. _I'm not going to get any sleep in this bedroom, so I might as well do something else with my time_. As was her norm when cases or worrying about Lindsey kept her up during the day, Catherine put on a pair of grubby sweats and pulled her hair back and started in on cleaning the house.

Four hours later, her house spotless and still two hours before she had to pick up Lindsey, Catherine sank into the couch cushions and closed her eyes, her thoughts scattered as she tried to compose her body into a short nap. At times like these, the changes in the nature of her relationship with Sara, and indeed in who Sara was beyond work and the lab, overwhelmed Catherine. _Who knew Sara could be so wicked and so funny, and god, so damn irresistible. How did I miss this side of her for all those years? So much hidden underneath, and I'm the lucky one who gets to see it. Although_, she thought as she considered her predicament, _lucky is a relative term. It's never been like this with anyone else, this constant need, to be with her, to get inside her head, to have her under my hands and in my heart all the time. _She was still musing when her cellphone rang several minutes later and Sara's voice greeted her.

"Sleep well?" she asked, a smile in her voice.

"Not at all."

"Oh, I'm sorry, baby." The way the word 'baby' rolled off Sara's tongue in that low, rough whisper made Catherine suddenly breathless, the sound vibrations traveling through her body like a caress, and she bit back a moan. "What's the matter, baby? Why can't you sleep?"

"You know why."

An evil chuckle filled her ears. "Yeah, maybe I do. It's good to know you miss me."

"When I get my hands on you…" Catherine threatened, but she couldn't come up with a credible threat to complete her sentence as a rush of images of Sara's body flooded her head.

"What will you do?"

"You'll just have to wait," Catherine purred, determined to come up with a suitable torture of her own, but one that didn't leave visible marks this time.

"Just 16 more hours to go," Sara taunted, and Catherine could visual the twinkle in her eyes perfectly.

"And I'll make you pay for every single minute of them," she promised as she snapped her phone shut, cutting Sara off, mid-chuckle.

That's when the countdown started; her phone chirped when the first text message arrived, simply bearing the number '15.' Catherine had ignored the first, then the second, but when '13' flashed on her phone, her fingers flew over the keypad, "will get u for this." Three seconds later, a reply, "u started it." Deciding to leave her lover a little off-balance, she tapped out a reply before turning off her phone and heading to the kitchen to start dinner.

Sara's smile was huge as she stared down at her phone and that final message: "love u."

**xxx**

Work distracted Sara for most of the night. The countdown continued relentlessly, but beyond a few lecherous looks in the break room, so blatant Catherine began to doubt the observational prowess of their colleagues, Catherine managed to avoid Sara's torturous teasing. So when her phone rang, she didn't think to look at the caller-id.

"Willows."

"I didn't have a chance to tell you I love the shirt you are wearing."

"I like it too."

"That's too bad. I don't think it will survive the morning."

"SARA!" Catherine growled over the phone as arousal rushed through her body.

"Catherine?" A surprised voice came from behind her.

"Gil!"

His tone was sad as he asked, "Are you and Sara fighting? Again?" Catherine drew a deep breath as she racked her brain for a plausible explanation. From the phone, she could hear Sara choking in laughter.

"I, um, no, no we aren't. Sara is teasing me about something and I was just trying to get her to stop."

"Oh. Ok." Gil gave her an odd look, as if he were trying to recall what teasing was like. "What's she teasing you about?" He asked, and over the pickup, Catherine could hear Sara's laughter, which had died down, renewed with even louder guffaws.

Catherine's eyes shot wide at Grissom's innocent question. "Ah, um, nothing, important, just, you know, girl stuff."

Thankfully, he didn't question. "Ok." He gave her one last strange look and he left.

Catherine turned back to the phone. "Are you still there?"

"Still… here." Catherine could hear Sara sucking in huge gasps of breath, trying to recover, but her throaty chuckle reverberated in Catherine's ear.

"You are so dead."

"But what a way to go…" There was a short pause as she recovered, whispering, "Bye hon." And then Catherine was stuck with a dead phone.

Sara straightened from where she had been leaning against her SUV, almost doubled over with laughter, the ache in her sides and the tears in her eyes a small price to pay. Brass and Nick were staring at her as she joined them, still chuckling. "What's so funny?" Jim asked while Nick chimed in with, "Was that your boyfriend on the phone?"

"No, a girlfriend, actually," she said, letting them deliberately miscomprehend. "She just said something on the phone that could be misconstrued and a passerby heard her. It was funny."

"What did she say?"

"Oh, you know… just girl stuff." Walking away from Nick and Brass, Sara fired off a quick text message, "meet u in locker rm /shift." Catherine stared down at her phone for a long second and then headed off to a lab, determined to find something to occupy her time for the next three hours.

Dutifully waiting for Sara in the locker room at the end of shift, Catherine nearly jumped when Nick walked in, looking behind him for a glimpse of the tall brunette. Seeing nothing, she tried to hide her disappointment and said, "Hey Nick. How's your case going?"

"Got some solid evidence. I should wrap it up early next shift?"

"You? I mean, wasn't Sara working that with you?"

"Yeah, she was, but Grissom pulled her off to help him with a db over on Industrial. Poor girl, it looks like she's going to be working a double." The rest of his words continued on past Catherine as her mind was stuck on the word 'double."

"Sara's working a double?" Catherine asked, interrupting Nick mid-sentence.

"Yeah, I was just saying that… She must have had plans with that guy of hers because she looked really disappointed. You know, I think this thing is getting serious…" Catherine tuned out his words again as she leaned back against the locker, her head knocking back into the sheet metal with a thump. _Damn!_


	31. Chapter 31

AN: Been a while. Part 31 of 35 or 36, as I'm trying to wrap this story up. This installment is a bit choppy as I get back in the swing of things, jumping around a bit to provide a sense of snapshots or quick hits, the more mundane moments.

**xxx**

Sara stepped out of the lab, squinting in the late morning sun, forgetting, in her exhaustion, the sunglasses perched on the top of her head. She couldn't believe her luck; first, Grissom pulls her off an interesting case to work a suspicious circs that ended up being a cardiac arrest, at the same time managing to mess up her plans with Catherine. So he managed to screw her over, both professionally and personally, with one dumb move. It was nice that he was working more scenes with her, but sometimes it got too much, especially when it meant that Catherine had left hours before her and was probably at home asleep by now.

Or so she had thought until Catherine's clear tones called to her.

Sara turned to the SUV parked in an unobtrusive corner, her lips curving into a smile, "Catherine." Her smile faltered, though, as Catherine's rigid stance, arms crossed over her body and hard line of her mouth registered. "Catherine" she called again, her voice starting to waver toward uncertain as she tried to penetrate the dark lens of the blonde's sunglasses to read her eyes.

"Trying to get out of our plans by working late?" The blonde snapped impatiently as she flipped a set of keys into the air for Sara to catch, already stomping around to the passenger side of the truck. "You drive."

Sara slid behind the steering wheel, not quite sure of what to expect, so Catherine's frontal assault took her off guard. Catherine pulled her halfway over the center console and caught her in a fierce kiss, hungrily devouring her mouth. Sara finally managed to pull back a little, only to have Catherine try to follow her into her seat. "God, I thought you would never get done with work…" the blonde said breathlessly.

"Catherine!" Sara knew her voice sounded a bit shocked, "We're in the parking lot at work!"

"There's no one here."

"Someone could drive up."

"The windows are tinted and we're parked off in a corner. Nobody'll see."

"Catherine!"

Catherine leaned back and regarded her flustered girlfriend with a bemused smile. "Since when are you such a prude?"

Sara flushed, "I'm not, it's just…"

"Just what?" The amusement in Catherine's voice caused Sara's face to get a bit redder; she knew Catherine loved her flustered almost as much as she hated being flustered. "It's not like we haven't had sex at work… or in a car…"

"Not during the day, not outside of work." Glancing around the parking lot again, she turned and gave Catherine one of those self-conscious, sheepish half-smiles and shoulder shrugs that Catherine never seems to be able to resist, a fact she suspected Sara knew and was using to her own advantage. "There's just so many avenues to sneak up on a car. All the windows. I get a little nervous."

Sara looked at Catherine a bit apprehensively, like she was afraid of Catherine's reaction, and Catherine just shook her head, laughing to her self. "You are so cute sometimes," she said as she leaned in for another long deep kiss. Finished, she settled into her seat while Sara watched, a little confused and still a little apprehensive. "Drive," Catherine commanded, her tone still colored by her amusement at her girlfriend's quirks.

Sara studiously avoided looking at her, knowing she was being made fun of, and instead asked, "Your place or mine?"

"Yours. It's closer." When Sara just chuckled at that, Catherine leaned over to give her a nice look down her shirt and growled, _You have a lot of time to make up for_, in her ear.

"I had to work," Sara mock-protested. "And besides, it's your own fault. If you hadn't…"

"I have _more_ than made up for that slip…"

"You sure? Because the guys are still teasing me about it."

Catherine's fingers had somehow ended up on Sara's knee, and were making lazy circles up her thigh. "I am very sure. Now drive faster."

"You're going to cause an accident," Sara deadpanned as Catherine continued her slow tease.

"You're the one driving."

"You're the one distracting me."

"Learn to be more focused," Catherine suggested as she traced figure eights on up and down Sara's thigh.

"I would but," Sara said as she slowed for a traffic light and pulled Catherine in for a surprise kiss, only breaking away when a horn honked behind them, "you are kind of impossible to ignore."

Catherine looked positively smug at the compliment; "I wouldn't have it any other way."

**xxx**

"Did they find her?" Warrick asked as Catherine clicked shut her cell phone. They had been working a case that involved a missing baby, stolen from a woman's car, and the stress level in the lab had been building steadily as the minutes had ticked by, making the possibility of finding the child alive seem more and more remote. As usual, Grissom and Catherine were taking the case particularly hard, and everyone had been keeping a careful eye on them.

Catherine just nodded, her eyes shut tightly, as if to keep the horrific images that Brass had just described to her over the phone at bay.

She heard the quiet resignation in Warrick's voice as he read her emotions, "Is she dead?"

"Not… not just dead. Beaten, to death, with a rock of some kind, and left in the desert." She spared the others in the room the other, more ghastly details Brass had given her, wishing she herself could have been spared them. When she heard Warrick moving toward her, she held up a hand to stop him, knowing that would cause her to completely break down and she really didn't want that, not there in such a public place with the day shift roaming the halls.

She heard quieter steps approaching, heard Warrick's warning, "Sara…" and then felt the warm brush of Sara's fingers against her wrist.

She opened her eyes then, locking in with Sara's, and saw the perfect blend of strength and comfort there, enough to shore her up for a few more minutes. "Wanna walk it off?" Sara offered, her thumb lightly stroking the inside of Catherine's wrist in a calming gesture.

"Sounds like a plan," Catherine replied shakily, letting Sara lead her from the conference room to the privacy of Grissom's office, waiting until she heard the click of the door shutting before wrapping herself around Sara's lanky body and sobbing.

**xxx**

It had been a slow night. There was nothing worse than a slow night in Sara's mind, because a slow night meant two distinct and unrelated things: paperwork and time, time that the guys used on teasing, pranks, and entirely too much talking. Like now; she had wandered into the break room for a refill and had gotten trapped by the guys and their seemingly unending curiosity about her love life. Apparently, she had been the subject of conversation long before she had stepped into the room.

"So, Sara, this thing has been going on for a while," Nick had started, innocently enough.

"What thing?" she asked as she added sugar to her coffee, just bored enough with her paperwork to get in on the conversation.

"Your little fling." Greg's voice was entirely too cheerful.

"Look, guys…"

"Come on, Sara, we're just curious. We're your friends."

"And you are really happy. We just want to know more about him."

"Why? So you can take notes and be prepared if I break up with him?" The pronoun sounded odd to her ears, and she realized with a start that the hiding was beginning to take a toll on her. She was getting to a place where she wanted to let them in on her, or rather their, happiness. And it was indeed happiness; even Grissom had noticed and commented on it.

"No," Greg retorted defensively, a little too defensively, and Sara smiled over the rim of her mug. "I just think we should know something about the guy before the wedding."

"There won't be a wedding, Greg."

"Why not?"

_Why not? Hmmm, it's illegal, I'm not quite sure the lab would be ready for it, the press and sheriff would have a field day, Ecklie would have an aneurysm… so maybe it wouldn't be all bad_. She grinned, and finally replied, "I'm just not the marrying kind."

"But you are right," she said, to forestall any other questions. "He," and again she almost stumbled on the pronoun, "does make me happy. I'm just not ready to share yet." She met first Warrick's, then Nick's, then Greg's eyes apologetically, hoping they understood. "When I am, I promise you'll be the first I share with." Seeing a reluctant agreement, she made her escape.

When Catherine came in a few moments later, they seemed to be deep in thought. "What's up?"

"We're trying to figure out just how this guy makes Sara so happy."

"I mean, he doesn't send her flowers to the lab…"

"I never see her out with him…"

"She's not wearing any new jewelry or diamonds…"

Catherine chuckled at their cliqued thinking. "You really think Sara's going to be wooed by expensive jewelry or sappy romantic gestures?"

"Yeah, we are talking Sara here."

"Maybe… huh."

"A new scanner?"

"Textbooks?"

"A controlling share in the body farm?"

Greg's outrageous speculation got them all to laugh, and Catherine just shook her head and rolled her eyes, all the while thinking that she would have had the same difficulty just a few short weeks ago, but now, it was easy to find little surprises and gifts. A thermos of Sara's favorite coffee in her locker before shift, a mix CD for her car, a bottle of wine, a home-cooked dinner, a package of those weird imported mints she liked and swore numbed her mouth and nose at a crime scene so she didn't get nauseous… but mostly it was spending time: a bike ride, a movie while curled up on the couch, a game of cribbage by the fireplace.

In her reflection, she had lost track of the conversation but picked it up again when she heard the word 'sex.'

"Obviously the sex is good," Greg was saying.

"Yeah," Warrick agreed. "She let him give her a hickey…" and Nick shuddered in mock horror. "I'm trying to forget, man…" he whined.

"You think the sex is just _good_?" she questioned, a little piqued by the adjective being used.

"It's just hard to imagine…" Warrick began.

"Yeah, Sara and mind-blowing sex don't seem to go together."

"Guys, she's like my sister," Nick protested, obviously pained by the turn of the conversation.

"It's just that if it doesn't involve forensics…" Warrick continued, undeterred by Nick.

"I got it!" Greg sat up straight and snapped his fingers. "Role-playing!"

Nick simply groaned and hid his face in his hands as Warrick shook his head, "Sara? Are you serious?"

Catherine took that moment to slip away, deciding that it would be much more interesting to find the lab where Sara was hiding to finish her paperwork and discover a few new adjectives to describe sex with Sara. Loud laughter followed her down the hallway, and she turned back to give the boys one last, pitying, look. _If they only knew…_

**xxx**

"What do you think, Catherine?"

"Huh, what?" Catherine looked up from the book she had been reading to find her male colleagues gathered around break room table.

"What do you think we should get Sara for her birthday this year? It's coming up in a couple of weeks, you know," Greg told her, very clearly expecting her to not know. "I was thinking maybe a gift certificate to a restaurant so she and her boyfriend can go out to eat." At Catherine's blank look, he asked, "We are all going in on a gift for her again this year, aren't we?"

"Oh, not me this year. I already picked her up a little something."

"Oh, really? Like what?"

In her mind's eye, Catherine visualized the ring she had picked up for Sara two weeks before: a beautiful, halo-style titanium ring with ten garnets all the way around the band. When she had first seen it, she had immediately visualized it gracing Sara's hand, the thickness of the ring a perfect compliment to Sara's long, graceful fingers. And red stones, even though Sara's birthstone was blue sapphire, because Sara looked so good in red.

Catherine didn't realize that she had a small, secretive smile teasing the edges of her lips as she contemplated her gift, but then she realized that her colleagues were waiting for an answer, and she hoped her book hid her from too much scrutiny, "Oh, just a blouse I saw while shopping with Lindsey last week."

Greg sighed and flopped back into his chair. "She's probably going to blow off our traditional birthday breakfast for plans with her boyfriend too," he pouted, and then they were off, teasing him about his jealousy.

**xxx**

After Catherine's carefully planned birthday dinner had gone off without a hitch, the two of them ended up curled on the couch by the fireplace, finishing up the bottle of wine. Sara was admiring her ring as Catherine curled around her. "I love it."

"Are you sure? I didn't get it for your ring finger because I wanted you to be able to wear it to work and I know sapphire is your actual birthstone…"

"Catherine," Sara shushed her with a finger, "I love it."

"Good. It looks perfect on your hand, just like I imagined it." Sara caught Catherine's hand and loosely laced their fingers together, staring at their interlocked hands for a few moments.

"You, on the other hand, need a more traditional ring," she mused.

"Me? I, I don't need a…" Catherine stuttered, feeling a rising panic that Sara would think that she was pushing, as Sara had been very clear on her need for things to develop slowly. "I just saw the ring and thought of you, I didn't mean…"

Sara rolled over to face her babbling girlfriend, silencing her with a kiss. "It's a good thing you don't need a ring, since your birthday isn't for several months." She grinned before turning more serious. "And it wouldn't be a marriage kind of thing, you know, no more than this is. I get that, your intentions for the ring. I'm not sure how I feel about marriage, the necessity and expense of it, it's not really my kind of thing." She traced Catherine's fingers. "A ring would be like a… a…"

"Promise?"

"Yeah, a promise." She was serious and solemn as she gazed up into Catherine's eyes. "I really do love you, you know."

Catherine smiled through the sudden blurriness of her vision. "Good, because I think I'm falling for you, too."


End file.
